Level up your Schoology Game

As we head back into school during uncertain times, it's a perfect opportunity to review our use of Schoology and make sure we are thinking about how best to help coach our students through our digital environments.

Establishing digital classroom procedures will be essential to the daily success of our students. From the beginning, consider the classroom norms you want your students to follow. We will need to explicitly state how students should:

• navigate coursework
• check feedback on assignments
• keep assignments in order (through checklists or making intentional use of the built in Schoology calendar)
  

Help students track through their work with hyperlinked to do lists, and keep them in Schoology as much as you can with content pages that includes embedded videos and readings.

Below you will find videos to help you with some of the big skills that will help you set up Schoology for success.

If you are teaching multiple sections of the same course, save yourself some time by linking them. The students will see the same experience, but you will only have to create the grade book once and in one shot assign materials to all the courses.

If you teach multiple sections of the same course, and you have to personalize the courses, you will likely not want to link them.

If you are going to link your course, you must do this before we start the school year, otherwise you will lose grades.

This year we will also need to wait until our Schoology duplicate courses are straightened out. It would be good to wait until the end of the week for this. *Please note your customizations as far as course photos and updates may be lost when you first do this and you will need to re-do this.

Before you make up your mind, check out more information from Schoology here, and check out the video below.

You can assign a template from Microsoft or Google to students and it will force copy that template for easy student and teacher access.

This is the digital equivalent of making a copy of a handout.

As students add their own work, the teacher can check in on it in real time and make sure students are staying on track.

Keep track of how much of your Schoology content students are actively engaging in through the use of completion rules.

You can require students view, submit, score a certain score and discuss things before they get to move forward in a unit. This is a great strategy for mastery learning or for NTI where students are more independent in their path, pace and place in the lesson.

The newer Assessment tool inside of Schoology has many newer tech enhanced question type that you might use to create quick formative assessments if you're in a jam.

You can turn worksheets into fill in the blank, drag and drop activities that will grade themselves and you can use highlight image and upload file question types for quick math or written assessments that require students to circle correct answers or show work. The highlight image question type could even be used to have students annotate a picture of a text for key details and main idea.

There are also certain textbook platforms like Inspire Science that will allow you to export the test items like a Blackboard test and upload them to Schoology.

Check out the videos below for the basic how-to.

You can still collect work that students have written by hand by asking them to take a photo and uploading to Schoology. Encourage students to create a scan of the work through their Notes app on iPads or the iPhone and then submit to the Schoology app.

Once students have made submissions as an image, doc, or pdf, you can use the annotation tool through the iPad app to give handwritten feedback like you would on paper.

See how students do this in the first video, and then check out how you can give feedback in the second.

Pages are a great way to keep materials organized in a steady stream for students and to help them stay inside the lesson. One thing with digital learners is that a device provides students with endless distractions. We can minimize those distractions (to an extent) by keeping things in one spot as much as possible.

A Schoology page is also a great way to create a hyperlinked To Do list that sits inline at the top of the materials section. The video below will show you how to create pages to help students stay on track.

You can use Schoology to help remind your students when they have Teams meetings if they are struggling to connect.

Scheduling the meeting through your Teams calendar and then posting links to a To Do list or to a Schoology Calendar so that it appears in the "Upcoming Area".

Email: heidi.neltner@fortthomas.kyschools.us
Website: ftisedtech.blogspot.com
Twitter: @heidinelt