Schoology LMS - Review 2022 - Bourgeois Fortall

Educational learning management system (LMS) software has traditionally served higher educational activity. Just over the by decade, several companies have rolled out 1000-12 versions. Some take even begun to cater explicitly to One thousand-12 institutions. Edmodo, which I previously described as ane part education LMS and 2 parts academic social media network, targets primary and secondary educational activity. Schoology bridges the divide betwixt the two with offerings for K-12 and higher teaching. You could call it one office Blackboard and two parts Edmodo.

Like to Blackboard Acquire, Schoology offers a next-gen API and Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) support, custom branding, granular role creation, advanced assessments, and detailed analytics, for a fee. Like Edmodo, however, Schoology employs a familiar Facebook aesthetic with gamification features, mobile apps, and parental accounts. Its freemium pricing model is also comparable to that of Edmodo. Students, parents, and teachers can play for free, but admins volition pay for premium add-on features. With the face of a social network and the foundation of an enterprise LMS, Schoology hits the sweet spot for K-12 learning management.

Interoperability and Integrations

Schoology features interoperability customers might look from a flagship LMS such as Blackboard, Instructure Sheet LMS, D2L Brightspace, and Moodle. Like to Google Classroom or Edmodo, Schoology integrates with school districts' Student Information Systems (Sis). However, thanks to back up for the LTI standard, administrators can go a footstep further and connect information technology with an existing LMS. In my view, this makes Schoology viable in post-secondary institutions, where many colleges and universities have invested securely in homebrew LMS.

Last June, Schoology expanded that support to include the IMS Question and Test Interoperability specification (QTI), through which administrators can import various tertiary-political party question types and learning objectives into the organisation. Recent partnerships with SAFARI Montage, Nearpod, and BrainPOP further expand educators' access to external resource and curricula. Perhaps nearly meaning for K-12 educators, even so, is the platform's deepening integration with Google and Microsoft. In addition to single sign-on (SSO), students and teachers can now access Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive resources without leaving Schoology, and use Google and OneDrive resources as templates. Instructors can use the new Google and Microsoft Assignment apps to assign and provide feedback on Docs, Spreadsheets, Slideshows, and Drawings without leaving Schoology.

Roles and Calendar

Schoology employs what it calls a user-axial design. In do, that means you will only see what's relevant to your role. Whether you sign in as a student, a parent, a instructor, or an administrator, you run across a Facebook-style feed of recent activity related to your courses, groups, and school. Recent Activity is peculiarly useful for teachers and administrators, who tin can apply it to post updates, assignments, and events.

From the right column, all users can meet upcoming items from the calendar. A instructor, nevertheless, can use that cavalcade for one-click access to assignments. While the activity feed invites more student collaboration, it can likewise distract them from their courses. Thankfully, Schoology has anticipated that concern and updated the homepage dashboard so that when students sign into the platform, they automatically arrive on the homepage of their course. They even so accept access to the activity feed, merely they have to choose to enter it, rather than having it on their homepage by default.

The left-aligned navigation bar varies based upon role. Students can access form grades and omnipresence (Grades/Attendance), pupil performance (Mastery), a school directory (People), and private messages (Messages). To this, educators gain the ability to add together students to classes (Manage Users); monitor mentee omnipresence, enrollments, grades, and schedules (Advisees); and access instructional and management applications (App Centre). Finally, administrators gain tabs for settings and integrations (System Settings), advanced analytics (Schoolhouse Analytics), and options to import and consign information (Import, Consign). For obvious reasons, I performed most testing from the administrative account.

Before I plow to class assembly, I want to take a moment to highlight one especially useful tool in Schoology. As an aggregate of assignments, discussions, events, and quizzes, the Calendar provides an aerial view of everything happening in your class or school. Cheers to filtering and color-coding, I could as well imagine that regular users might utilise it as a personal calendar. Educators can even edit due dates by dragging and dropping items.

Form Basics

While I suspect well-nigh K-12 educators volition use Schoology to create blended learning environments, the platform supports i-to-one, self-paced, and fully online classes. You would retrieve that such generous support would make the LMS much more difficult to use than Edmodo, only Schoology scaffolds the procedure. For example, later on you create a grade shell, the LMS prompts you lot to add materials with both textual directions and screen grabs. Whatever materials yous add—Assignments, Discussions, Tests/Quizzes—can be reordered by dragging and dropping.

Schoology LMS

A adept place to start is with folders, which Schoology uses every bit course units. Those units can be fabricated visible to students, hidden, or exist fabricated bachelor at sure dates. With Student Completion Rules, educators tin can braze requirements to folder items. For example, I could require students to post a response to a give-and-take before they move to the next assignment. Schoology also recently released a Course Objectives tool, which teachers can use to correlate a grade's learning objectives with the standards of their school, commune, or state. The only caveat is that a school administrator must enable that feature in order for educators to access it.

Assignments and Discussions

Nearly every detail in Schoology tin can part every bit graded or ungraded classwork or homework. (I idiosyncrasy is that Media Albums cannot exist graded.) With Assignments, educators tin enable comments, submissions, or grades. Setting a due date pins the assignment to the calendar. When students submit assignments, educators needn't leave their Web browser (or iPad) to annotate documents. Schoology automatically converts submissions into PDFs. The company also offers annotation tools via native mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Kindle Fire. Educators can fifty-fifty adhere private comments for students, ideal for essay end comments.

Discussions are one way to encourage students to engage one another. Each word supports threaded comments and then that students can respond to individual posts. Students tin can even leave video comments via webcam, thanks to integration with BigBlueButton. Should a teacher desire to grade a give-and-take, new comments are tagged with a blueish dot, and grades entered at the thread automatically populate the Gradebook.

Assessments and Grades

Out of the box, educators can assign individual tests for instant results. Tests/Quizzes are uncategorized, and thus ungraded. Educators can either import questions from an existing test bank or create their ain. (More on this below.) Tests/Quizzes also support fourth dimension limits, effort limits, randomization, and question review. Educators can use Categories to organize graded items. For example, I created divide categories for homework, quizzes, and tests, though at that place's no cap on the number of categories you lot can create.

Teachers tin grade using either scales (based on percentage of points) or rubrics (existing or custom). G-12 administrators will capeesh that assessments can be aligned with state standards for easy reporting. Educators will appreciate that assessments tin can exist submitted from either the Gradebook or the consignment submission viewer. Schoology has revised its assessments tool to support enhanced question types (e.g., Fill-In-the-Blank, Brusk Answer, or Shared Passages) and engineering-enhanced questions (e.thousand., Highlight Image and Hotspot, Highlight Text) that it will make available via its the Enterprise programme.

Assessment Management Platform (AMP)

Also available to Schoology Enterprise customers is Schoology'due south Assessment Direction Platform (AMP). Whereas many institutions rely upon a standalone system for versioning and particular banking, AMP is fully-integrated inside the LMS, which spares school districts from having to pay a separate vendor. Once enabled, AMP appears in the Resources carte. In addition to automatically saving questions as they're created, the Question bank includes rich new types. Students can drag and drop bar graphs (Chart), place text on an interactive number line (Numberline), or answer various types of question about a single passage (Shared Passage). One of my favorite additions is Highlight Text, which educators can utilise to make parts of a passage clickable, a feature that ought to prove useful for grammar, spelling, or translation quizzes.

While educators tin maintain their own question banks, versioning makes collaboration more than appealing. Any particular can exist linked to rubrics and learning outcomes, and saved as existence in a typhoon, agile, or retired state. (The LMS retains "retired" information for reporting). Because AMP is integrated into the LMS, changes to assessments flow out to courses. That is, if I update the text of a Shared Passage, it will automatically update all instances of that question. When it comes to reports, admins tin get together cess teams using a host of granular roles. Reports tin can aggregate data from across a department (useful for a nursing program) or from across multiple school districts (platonic for common assessments). This by July, in fact, Schoology released a new set of analytics (Particular Analysis) with which administrators can take a deeper dive into question-level detail. Admins tin can even sort and filter data past schoolhouse, instructor, or learning objective in order to identify best practices that they might want to promote across a program, a school, or a district.

Groups, Group Resources, and App Store

Until now, I've talked about resources that instructors create and save to personal filing cabinets (Personal Resources). But educators tin also utilize Groups to share resources. Schoology users have groups for clubs, sports teams, grades, and fifty-fifty departments. Educators can take advantage of these organizations by searching for and joining groups related to their interests. For example, at that place are more than vii,000 members in a Language Arts group and 17,000 members in Flipped Classrooms. In one case connected to a group, you lot tin can explore its resources. For Flipped Classrooms, in that location are folders with HTML tags, cooperative education forms, and folders total of diagnostics. Even if yous don't employ materials verbatim, you can approach them as templates for your own resources.

Finally, Schoology offers a robust App Center. Through third-political party integrations, educators and administrators tin can enable external applications in their courses and schools. For example, I added apps from Khan Academy and TurnItIn, though a Thousand-12 teacher might gravitate instead to BrainNook or Common Core Mastery. In add-on to educational resources, third-political party services for Dropbox, Google Bulldoze, Evernote, and Microsoft OneDrive allow users to draw from other repositories inside Schoology. My one quibble is that there isn't a quick way to bound amid apps y'all've downloaded (My Resource Apps) and the App Center.

The Sweet Spot

Schoology earns an Editors' Choice award—which it shares with Moodle and Canvass—because it provides an LMS simple enough that students and parents will want to use it, simply sophisticated enough that administrators tin control the nuances of that learning feel. While I wish Schoology was more forthcoming most pricing, the company bundles enough features for gratuitous that many users won't need to consider upgrading. Despite this review's length, I nevertheless haven't discussed the platform's gamification features (custom badges), generous file support (LTI-compliant content), and instant messaging—all standard with the free account. Instead, I encourage interested students, parents, and teachers to sign upwards and see for themselves.