Schoology

District 49 offers free educational courses to their teachers via the ERO.  Schoology training is a course I recently participated in; Schoology hosts your website, your content, and your files. Best of all, it connects you with your students to help improve outcomes.  Academic and technological agility have become necessary characteristics of 21st-century educational institutions. Schoology gives you an edge by simplifying the process of building unique webpages with dynamic content creation tools and a user-centric interface.

Staying on top of every event in an institution is tough enough without adding multiple calendar interfaces to the mix. Schoology aggregates your personal, course, school, and district calendars into a single interface to simplify and centralize your organizational efforts.

Schoology’s calendars are color coded, provide automatic updating, and can synchronize with other web-based calendars such as Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar.

There's no longer a need to learn HTML or CSS in order to create custom pages and text blocks. Schoology's Page feature provides a rich text editor for easy and intuitive page customization. For the growing number of code users, there is also an option to use HTML and CSS at any time.

With the ability to view all of the work assigned to a particular student from every course and even set color-coded workload thresholds, you can ensure your students are never overloaded at any given time.

In addition to basic messaging, Schoology’s enhanced communication provides extensive options for different message types. From systemwide announcements to personalized messaging that corresponds to configurable roles and permissions, Schoology provides a safe and effective alternative to email. Comprehensive word filters also allow administrators the ability to regulate all messaging content to ensure a constructive, academic environment.

Schoology enables you to create, import, and export user data and course enrollments easily. You can set custom roles and permissions and easily manage large groups of people.

With Schoology, instructors have the tools they need for mastery learning in one comprehensive solution, including student mastery reporting. Instructors can easily track student performance over time on an individual and course basis and then use this valuable insight to make better, more impactful decisions.  Making sure that your instructors grade and assess students consistently is simple with Schoology’s systemwide grading scale setup. Percentage and point-based grading scales created at the system level will instantly appear in all live courses throughout your institution.

Schoology allows you to record audio and video files right in the platform and embed them in assignments, discussions, and any other content.

A custom domain allows the branding of Schoology to match your institution. For instance, you might use http://learning.myschool.edu instead of http://www.schoology.com.

I learned how to access and utilize Schoology for use in my classroom throughout a series of online activities, informational guides, and video lessons from my instructor.  The challenge we still face; limited access to technology.