One of my most important tools in the classroom has been Schoology. We use it almost daily and it is a great resource for the students.
I initially started using Schoology simply to have a place for students to find digital copies of the work from home. That was all I needed at the time and it was easy to do. I would make a folder for a unit and simply upload files into the folder. I did keep them in order, but I didn’t do more than that.
As time has passed, I have started doing more and more with Schoology and I know quite a few other teachers that also use it. This has become even more helpful now that we are working from home and I’ve been making videos to help some of my coworkers, if you are interested, click here. I will say that I have a class set of iPads, I know this changed a lot of how I was using them. Without these, I know I would still have it, but I would probably limit the use. Also, my district pays for the Enterprise Edition, which will also make this more useful, but not so much that I use it more now. I would still be using it.
The first and most important reason I like Schoology is because this gives students access to my work from anywhere they have a device that can connect to the internet. I’ve had athletes do work while on the bus to games. We have students with no internet access at their home, but they have a phone with data and they will use it for school! How does this help me? Let me count the ways:
- I never have to make extra copies. Student lost the first copy? Don’t worry, they can find it on Schoology and write anything they need to write down on a piece of paper (or the awesome notebook we keep). This is also true for the student that swears they didn’t lose it, they just spilled tea on it.
- No more telling me they couldn’t study because they left their notebook at school/grandma’s car/ friend’s house. Everything they need, including any reviews needed, are on Schoology. Again, they don’t have to print anything for me, they can write on notebook paper. Or construction paper because that is all they had. I have also been making a folder in the unit folder that is titles “Videos to Review for Test” and include links to a couple short review videos that would be helpful. Often they are Teacher’s Pet Biology videos because they are short, sweet, and to the point. Perfect!
- Parent’s can get a parent code to get access to Schoology as well; which means parents can keep up with what we are doing and help their student find what they need. Do I have a lot of parents that do this? No, I absolutely don’t. Do the ones that do appreciate it? You bet they do!
- Formative assessments have never been easier. Assign a Test/Quiz and you can allow your students to see what they missed. Immediate feedback! Want them to retake it until they get a certain score? Set it up! They could do this for task cards, an actual test or quiz, bellwork, exit ticket or whatever else you wanted to do. You can see how they did immediately. I know not all formative assessments need a grade or hard data, but sometimes you need actual numbers to see how things are going. You can see graphs for your questions to breakdown the answers given. Very useful when you want a quick glimpse of how lessons are going.
- They have public resources! These are teacher-made resources that they have shared. All in one place. Like with all other resources you can find, some are better than others, but it is a great place to search for some ideas. They are free resources that teachers have chosen to make available. You can chose to make yours available to the public or not when you save anything to your resources.
I will go ahead and tell you that I have never used Google Classroom. When it first started being a thing more people were doing, I was already using Schoology; so, I cannot give you a comparison. I can tell you that Schoology is easy to use and easy to set up. I will follow up with other posts about how to do certain things and how I organize it, but until then, if you have any questions, let me know!
