Schoology LMS

Schoology LMS

TM

EDITOR RATING: EXCELLENT

PROS

Free for individuals. Numerous roles available out of the box. Intuitive yet full-featured course assembler. Rubrics and standards alignment. Web-based grading and annotations. App Center. Generous mobile support.

CONS

Minor UI idiosyncrasies. Premium features entail an undisclosed fee.

BOTTOM LINE

With the face of a social network and the foundation of an enterprise LMS, Schoology hits the sweet spot for K-12 learning management services.

TM BY WILLIAM FENTON | Educational Learning Management System (LMS) have traditionally served higher education. However, over the past decade the mostdominant platforms, including Blackboard, Moodle, and Instructure Canvas, have rolled out K-12 versions. Recently, several companies have even begun to cater

explicitly to K-12 institutions. Edmodo, which I previously described as one-part education LMS and two-parts academic social media network, targets primary and secondary education. Schoology bridges the divide with offerings for K-12 and higher education. You could call it one-part Blackboard and two-parts Edmodo.

Similar to Blackboard, Schoology offers a next-gen API (that interoperates with your SIS), advanced role creation, custom branding, and detailed analytics, for a fee. Like Edmodo, however, Schoology uses a familiar Facebook aesthetic with gamification features, mobile apps, and parent accounts. Its freemium pricing model is also comparable to that of Edmodo: Students, parents, and teachers can play for free, but admins will 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.

Roles and Calendar Schoology employs what it calls a user-centric design. In practice, that means you will only see what's relevant to your role. Whether you sign in as a student, parent, teacher, or administrator, you see a Facebook-style feed of recent activity related to your courses, groups, and school. Recent activity is particularly useful for teachers and administrators, who can use it to post updates, assignments, and events. From

the right column, all users can see upcoming items from the calendar. A teacher, however, can use that column for oneclick access to assignments.

The left-aligned navigation bar varies based upon role. Students can access class grades and attendance (Grades/ Attendance), student performance (Mastery), school directory (People), and private messages (Messages). To this, educators gain the ability to add students to classes (Manage Users), monitor mentee attendance, enrollments, grades, and schedules (Advisees), and access to instructional and management applications (App Center). Finally, administrators gain tabs for settings and integrations (System Settings), advanced analytics (School Analytics), and options to import and export data (Import, Export). For obvious reasons, I performed most testing from the administrative account.

Before I turn to course assembly, I want to take a moment to highlight one particularly 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. Thanks to filtering and color-coding, I could also imagine that regular users might use it as a personal calendar. Educators can even edit due dates by dragging and dropping items.

Course Basics While I suspect most K-12 educators will use Schoology to create blended learning environments, the platform supports 1:1, self-paced, and fully online classes. You would think that such generous support would make the LMS much more difficult to use than Edmodo, but Schoology scaffolds the process. For example, after you create a course shell, the LMS prompts you to add materials with both textual directions

and screen grabs. Whatever materials you add--Assignments, Discussions, Tests/Quizzes--can be reordered by dragging and dropping.

A good place to start is with folders, which Schoology uses as course units. Those units can be made visible to students, hidden, or they can be made available at certain dates. With Student Completion Rules, educators can affix requirements to folder items. For example, I could require students to post a response to a discussion before they move to the next assignment.

Assignments and Discussions Nearly every item in Schoology can function as graded or ungraded classwork or homework. (One idiosyncrasy is that Media Albums are not gradeable.) With Assignments, educators can 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 even attach private comments for students, ideal for essay end comments.

Discussions are one way to encourage students to engage one another. Each discussion supports threaded comments so that students can respond to individual posts. Students can even leave video comments via webcam, thanks to

integration with BigBlueButton. Should a teacher want to grade a discussion, new comments are tagged with a blue dot, and grades entered at the thread automatically populate the Gradebook.

Assessments and Grades When it comes to assessment, educators can assign individual tests for instant results. By default, Tests/Quizzes are uncategorized, and thus ungraded. (More on this in a moment.) Educators can either import questions from an existing bank or create their own. Tests/Quizzes also support time limits, attempt limits, randomization, and question review.

Educators can use Categories to organize graded items. For example, I created separate categories for homework, quizzes, and tests, though there's no cap on the number of categories you create. Teachers can grade using either scales (percentage of points-based) or rubrics (existing or custom). K-12 administrators will appreciate that assessments can be aligned with state standards for easy reporting. Educators will appreciate that assessments can be submitted from either the Gradebook or the assignment submission viewer.

Groups, Group Resources, and App Store Until now, I've talk about resources that instructors create and save to personal filing cabinets (Personal Resources). However, educators can also use Groups to share resources. Schoology users have groups for clubs, sports teams, grades,

and even departments. Educators can take advantage of these organizations by searching for and joining groups related to their interests. For example, there are more than 7,000 members in a Language Arts group and 17,000 members in Flipped Classrooms.

Once connected to a group, you can explore its resources. For Flipped Classrooms, there are folders with HTML tags, cooperative education forms, and folders full of diagnostics. Even if you don't use materials verbatim, you can approach them as templates for your own resources.

Finally, Schoology offers a robust App Center. Through third-party integrations, educators and administrators can enable external applications in their courses and schools. For example, I added apps from Khan Academy and TurnItIn, though a K-12 teacher might gravitate instead to BrainNook or Common Core Mastery. In addition to educational resources, third-party services for Dropbox, Google Drive, 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 jump among apps you've downloaded (My Resource Apps) and the App Center.

The Sweet Spot Schoology earns an Editors' Choice award (which it shares with Moodle and Absorb) because it provides an LMS simple enough students and parents will want to use it but sophisticated enough that administrators can control the nuances of that learning experience. While I wish that Schoology was more forthcoming about pricing--Edmodo starts at $1 per user per year--the company bundles enough features for free that many users won't need to consider upgrading. Despite this review's length, I still 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 up and see for themselves.

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