Week 14: Schoology Learning Management System

 

The Learning Management System(LMS) our District uses is Schoology. We have used Schoology since we became a 1:1 District in 2012. This LMS has come a long way in the almost 10 years we have been implementing this tool. When we first started using Schoology it was really just a replacement tool to put documents and maybe incorporate an assessment or discussion board. Today, Schoology is so much more and offers opportunities for individualized learning and has a great potential to be a tool for Blended Learning. 

The first thing that I think is important to do when setting up your personal Schoology page is to add pictures to your courses. This helps your students, especially middle and high school students who have multiple classes. This gives them a visual for your class and can find it easily without having to read every tile. 

The next feature that is great is for working on a team or setting up groups for clubs or homeschool students. This is where individualization can come into play. We have a group for all five of our Art I teachers. The benefit of this is everyone is an administrator and can add material and then we can just copy that material to our courses. I also use it for students who are working on a specific contest. This helps not clutter my actual course page. Students are given the course access code and then can get the information that way. You can also set up groups with other teachers in the district to share materials. 

Within the groups, you can save your resources to be shared. These resources are stored from year to year and are not deleted as long as your district continues using the LMS.

This is how you can copy the resources your classes

The next thing I am going to show you is how I layout my page. I always color coordinate my 6 weeks folders. This helps students keep track of where we are and where they might need to go back and makeup work. And the weekly folders get moved into the 6-week folder when progress report or report cards are due. This helps students know where we are in the grading period. 

I highlighted the Folder for Mario to show you how you can assign individual folders for students inside classes.  

The next thing is all the options you get when making your materials in Schoology. It shows how you can mark the folder to Individually assign to a specific student and mark for student completion. 

You can also add google, Edpuzzle, writable, TeEd, Nearpod, Kami, Loom, and many more options. Below is a poster of some more tips and tricks for Schoology. One of my favorites is Linking classes together that are the same. So, I have all my Ceramic 2 classes, Art 1 Classes linked, so there is only one tile for those classes instead of 2. It is a time saver!