Schoology LMS ™ EDITOR RATING: EXCELLENT
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Schoology LMS ™ EDITOR RATING: EXCELLENT PROS CONS BOTTOM LINE Free for individuals. Numerous roles available Minor UI idiosyncrasies. Premium features entail With the face of a social network and the out of the box. Intuitive yet full-featured course an undisclosed fee. foundation of an enterprise LMS, Schoology hits assembler. Rubrics and standards alignment. the sweet spot for K-12 learning management Web-based grading and annotations. App Center. services. Generous mobile support. ™ BY WILLIAM FENTON | Educational the right column, all users can see upcoming items from the Learning Management System (LMS) calendar. A teacher, however, can use that column for one- have traditionally served higher education. click access to assignments. However, over the past decade the most- dominant platforms, including Blackboard, The left-aligned navigation bar varies based upon role. Moodle, and Instructure Canvas, have Students can access class grades and attendance (Grades/ rolled out K-12 versions. Recently, several Attendance), student performance (Mastery), school companies have even begun to cater directory (People), and private messages (Messages). To explicitly to K-12 institutions. Edmodo, which I previously this, educators gain the ability to add students to classes described as one-part education LMS and two-parts academic (Manage Users), monitor mentee attendance, enrollments, social media network, targets primary and secondary grades, and schedules (Advisees), and access to instructional education. Schoology bridges the divide with offerings and management applications (App Center). Finally, for K-12 and higher education. You could call it one-part administrators gain tabs for settings and integrations (System Blackboard and two-parts Edmodo. Settings), advanced analytics (School Analytics), and options to import and export data (Import, Export). For obvious Similar to Blackboard, Schoology offers a next-gen API (that reasons, I performed most testing from the administrative interoperates with your SIS), advanced role creation, custom account. branding, and detailed analytics, for a fee. Like Edmodo, however, Schoology uses a familiar Facebook aesthetic with Before I turn to course assembly, I want to take a moment gamification features, mobile apps, and parent accounts. to highlight one particularly useful tool in Schoology. As an Its freemium pricing model is also comparable to that of aggregate of assignments, discussions, events, and quizzes, Edmodo: Students, parents, and teachers can play for free, the Calendar provides an aerial view of everything happening but admins will pay for premium add-on features. With the in your class or school. Thanks to filtering and color-coding, face of a social network and the foundation of an enterprise I could also imagine that regular users might use it as a LMS, Schoology hits the sweet spot for K-12 learning personal calendar. Educators can even edit due dates by management. dragging and dropping items. Roles and Calendar Course Basics Schoology employs what it calls a user-centric design. In While I suspect most K-12 educators will use Schoology to practice, that means you will only see what’s relevant to your create blended learning environments, the platform supports role. Whether you sign in as a student, parent, teacher, or 1:1, self-paced, and fully online classes. You would think that administrator, you see a Facebook-style feed of recent activity such generous support would make the LMS much more related to your courses, groups, and school. Recent activity difficult to use thanEdmodo , but Schoology scaffolds the is particularly useful for teachers and administrators, who process. For example, after you create a course shell, the LMS can use it to post updates, assignments, and events. From prompts you to add materials with both textual directions and screen grabs. Whatever materials you add—Assignments, integration with BigBlueButton. Should a teacher want to Discussions, Tests/Quizzes—can be reordered by dragging grade a discussion, new comments are tagged with a blue and dropping. dot, and grades entered at the thread automatically populate the Gradebook. A good place to start is with folders, which Schoology uses as course units. Those units can be made visible to students, Assessments and Grades hidden, or they can be made available at certain dates. With When it comes to assessment, educators can assign Student Completion Rules, educators can affix requirements individual tests for instant results. By default, Tests/Quizzes to folder items. For example, I could require students to post are uncategorized, and thus ungraded. (More on this in a a response to a discussion before they move to the next moment.) Educators can either import questions from an assignment. existing bank or create their own. Tests/Quizzes also support time limits, attempt limits, randomization, and question Assignments and Discussions review. Nearly every item in Schoology can function as graded or ungraded classwork or homework. (One idiosyncrasy is Educators can use Categories to organize graded items. that Media Albums are not gradeable.) With Assignments, For example, I created separate categories for homework, educators can enable comments, submissions, or grades. quizzes, and tests, though there’s no cap on the number of Setting a due date pins the assignment to the calendar. When categories you create. Teachers can grade using either scales students submit assignments, educators needn’t leave their (percentage of points-based) or rubrics (existing or custom). Web browser (or iPad) to annotate documents. Schoology K-12 administrators will appreciate that assessments can be automatically converts submissions into PDFs. (The company aligned with state standards for easy reporting. Educators will also offers annotation tools via native mobile apps foriOS , appreciate that assessments can be submitted from either Android, and Kindle Fire). Educators can even attach private the Gradebook or the assignment submission viewer. comments for students, ideal for essay end comments. Groups, Group Resources, and App Store Discussions are one way to encourage students to engage Until now, I’ve talk about resources that instructors create one another. Each discussion supports threaded comments and save to personal filing cabinets (Personal Resources). so that students can respond to individual posts. Students However, educators can also use Groups to share resources. can even leave video comments via webcam, thanks to 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. View this review online.