Schoology Is The Must Use LMS For K-12 Education
March 08, 2016

Schoology Is The Must Use LMS For K-12 Education

MJ Linane | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Schoology

Schoology is currently being used by teachers to deliver content to students. I have used it since 2013 and I know other teachers in my district are volunteering to join as well. We do not have a district mandated learning management system we must use, Schoology is the one we are choosing to use. The primary gap Schoology fills is how to deliver online content to students reliably and in a user-friendly environment. Schoology is a system that is easy to use by both teachers and students so there is buy-in by both primary users. The other gap, content delivery, is done remarkably well by Schoology. I can take my content, digitize it, deliver it, and have students interact with it seamlessly. I can also extend my class by including videos and external links. I can also increase student engagement with gamified badges and set up my class to focus on student mastery. All of this is not just challenging to do without Schoology, some of it would be impossible.
  • The first thing Schoology does well is manage the class. The beginning of the course is one of the most stressful because I am introducing both new technology and content to students. However, with Schoology, students can be on-boarded within minutes and my content is ready as fast as I am.
  • The second thing Schoology does well is content delivery. I can set up my course to deliver the content in the most efficient and engaging ways. I can set deadlines for individual assignments or group them into larger folders that would represent larger units.
  • Lastly, Schoology allows me to better engage my students. I have a classroom set of Chromebooks and to keep student engagement, there has to be little down-time. Schoology helps me to organize my content to quickly switch topics/lessons. There is no down-time of collecting or passing out papers. Nor is there down time where students are waiting around for the next instruction. I can put all of my content online and students can individually move through it at their own pace.
  • A con is their grading. I use Google Apps and specifically Google Docs for my student's writing assignments. The Schoology annotation feature for submissions is not the greatest and Google Docs provides a better feedback environment. Unfortunately, Google Docs can't be embedded so I need to have students submit their document links and then I need to go into Google Docs to give feedback. It adds more steps than I think it should take to give quick student feedback.
  • The Schoology grading/scoring interface can be very "click" heavy, whereby I need to click on multiple items before I finish grading each assignment. This slows down the process more than it should.
  • I am a teacher so there is not any way to measure ROI other than by student engagement and scoring. I can say with certainty that student engagement has increased since my use of Schoology. Students consistently rank Schoology as one of their top tools I use in my class.
Schoology beats all of their competitors, hands down. The primary reason is that Schoology is intuitive and reliable. It has the most features for free and allows me to have a tremendous amount of control over my course. There was not a single other LMS I encountered that did all I needed my LMS to do besides Schoology.
I have tested Schoology both when teaching in class and online. In both environments it has excelled. Schoology is a very robust LMS and works very well for instructors who are comfortable online and are not afraid of exploring new technology. It might be a little intimidating to new instructors at first but after a few days of interacting with Schoology should clear up any fears. Also, younger students might find the different folders and clickable areas a bit too much. I am thinking K-4th Grade. Schoology could be a platform for an individual instructor to sell their courses but it doesn't have a payment gateway. It is really meant for enterprise solutions rather than individual instructors.