Schoology - your go to learning management system?

As a teacher who travels between buildings in my district, I found the multiple calendars, grade books, and large stacks of papers to be overwhelming and an organizational nightmare.  At first, my solution was to spend specific days at each building to complete the work I needed to do and hope that everything would work out in my schedule.  This solution worked at first, but managing an additional calendar and schedule proved to be another organizational nightmare in itself.

I was looking for a solution to all of my organization problems.  I was looking for a way to incorporate technology that was not overbearing and easy to use at the beginning of a semester, in this case, spring semester.  I observed my students grow tired of the multiple emerging technologies I introduced to them throughout the fall semester and did not want students to develop a disdain for this new technology that I planned on incorporating into my classrooms.  I felt this technology was going to be extremely beneficial for managing my classes and it would offer an opportunity for students to collaboratively learn outside the classroom walls.

Enter Schoology.  This learning management system was a program I tooled around with over Christmas break with the intentions of integrating it into the classroom during the spring semester.  I have used Moodle and thought about using Edmodo as my learning management system for the remainder of the school year, but settled on Schoology after speaking with our technology director and learning more about Schoology through online tutorials and introduction videos.

Schoology provides a collaborative learning platform that combines course content and classroom management capabilities, all while coming with the communal features of a social networking site.  I saw using Schoology as an excellent opportunity to improve student engagement in my classroom.  I noticed Schoology touted that it worked well with third party technology programs such as Google Docs, ExamView, and Khan Academy which was another selling point in my selection process.

Other features that make Schoology an excellent learning management system are that is cloud-based, it is safe and private, allows for a teacher-student-parent collaborative learning environment, it did not require extra software, equipment, or maintenance, and Schoology offers an excellent support and feedback system that listens to their customers' needs.  I have used the feedback feature a couple times during the implementation period of using Schoology and was extremely pleased that Schoology applied some of my suggestions to make the program work better.  It was great!

If you are interested in learning more about Schoology, you can take a look at the introduction screencast I created.  It offers a very brief introduction to the website and the capabilities of this excellent learning management system.  I plan to do a series of videos to show how teachers can do specific things within the program.  However, I feel any teachers who are willing to learn something new and want to truly reduce the clutter and be more efficient in their instruction will find the program to be intuitive and easy to use.

Thanks for stopping by -- please e-mail me at youngert@uni.edu or tjyoungers@gmail.com if you have any questions about implementing Schoology into your classroom!

A little reflection -- blogosphere!

Once a person spends time following blogs and combing through material upon material, it isn't surprising that hours have passed.  I found myself glued to the several types of blogs that I was following as there is so much content to look at from the blogs I spoke about in my last post.

In order to give you a brief look at what these blogs are about, I will share my reviews, below.

(A quick side note, I noticed I follow all male bloggers, which was entirely by coincidence and may incidentally carry a biased viewpoint of the education scene... I am open to suggestions for female bloggers to follow!)


Dr. Z Reflects: http://drzreflects.blogspot.com/

- I find this blog to be an extremely useful tool in learning more about emerging technologies from an instructor's viewpoint.  I view this blog as a supplemental item in the vast array of resources provided in his course, but I also see the blog as a way to create a dialogue that can be initiated through the use of questions at the end of each blog.  I plan to check back often as I think Dr. Z has a lot of important information to share!  (Edit: 6/19/12 -- I also like the RAGBRAI posts infused in this blog -- I wish I could ride the whole week this year, but alas, will have to check into @zeitz for Twitter updates.)

David Warlick - 2 cents worth: http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/

- I was introduced to Mr. Warlick at the TICL 2011 conference in Storm Lake, Iowa last summer.  His keynote address was excellent and provided a chance to meet someone who really set the bar high for technology integration.  I will ll admit, I was extremely overwhelmed by the amount of information he provided during his time at TICL, and felt a little technologically-challenged as I barely knew what a tweet was coming into the conference.  Since the conference, I have checked back into his blog quite frequently and I receive new updates via Twitter when he has new blog posts.  A big thing I enjoyed learning about (and count to enjoy learning about) is Mr. Warlick's ideas from his book "A Gardener's Approach to Learning."  I have not purchased the book, maybe I'll request it for my upcoming birthday, but I review the notes I took during his breakout sessions from the conference.  This blog is a good one and will continue to be a source of information for me and hopefully my followers.

Joe Bower - for the love of learning: http://www.joebower.org/

- Joe Bower came onto my radar after many discussions of education reform in my mentoring meetings during this past school year.  First, I had no idea who Joe Bower was and probably never would have known about him if I had not looked up Rick Wormeli on YouTube and began watching his videos and following him on Twitter.  Through Twitter is where I met Joe Bower.  Mr. Bower's blog is not for the cut and dry, play it by the book, sit in your chair and let me share my knowledge, educators.  He's a reformer with a unique approach to our education system.  I have enjoyed quite a bit of Joe's work, but particularly enjoyed this blog -- "Here's What Really Happens When You Give A Zero."  His approach may not be mainstream, and may be hard to accept; but it does a great job of keeping the education reform discussion going.  It is clear that our education system needs fixing.


I have enjoyed my time looking at blogs and will continue to do so beyond this class.  I hope you took interest in the brief review of the three blogs I followed this past week.  If you have any suggestions as to which blogs I should follow please drop me a comment in the space below.  Now onto organizing all of my followed blogs onto ONE blogger account...

And so we begin...

Today marks the beginning of a new chapter in my life.  A chance to use my love of technology to further my education in a program that is extremely exciting.  I have enrolled, albeit a little delayed, in my first two classes of the Instructional Technology (MA) program at the University of Northern Iowa.  Go Panthers!


The journey will be long, but enlightening, engaging, and even challenging.  I expect many bumps along the road, and may lose many hours of sleep, but I excited to start this new learning opportunity.  The thought of learning and being able to use numerous types of emerging technologies is going to be excellent!  I love using technology, I love learning about new technology, and I love the idea of being able to improve my teaching craft through the learning that is going to take place in this course.

A couple new (and old) things to start me off... 

A new thing I have learned about is using Adobe Connect.  The first week of class I was unable to get connected with Adobe Connect, which was unfortunate, but after having been a part of this week's Adobe Connect, I can see the benefits of using this tool in an online learning community.  I like the basic platform of Adobe Connect and the capabilities of it.  I look forward to using it for the remainder of these courses and might consider using it in a future classroom, if applicable. 

As a requirement for our class, Dr. Z (@zeitz), asked us to begin using Twitter.  I must say, I have used Twitter quite exclusively (mainly for observing and learning new things) over the course of this past school year, and I wholeheartedly believe in its power as a learning tool.  However, I do not feel like I tweet enough to justify having followers!  My goal over the course of this summer and over the next school year are to tweet more about topics that will benefit my followers.  Also, I can see the power of retweeting information in order to keep an archive of what I have learned about.  I will keep the power of retweeting in mind as I continue to comb through my tweets. 

Blogs, blogs, and more blogs... 

Throughout our course, Dr. Zeitz has also asked us to begin following blogs as another source of learning material.  In the past, I blogged for a short time in a college course (evidence, below, which I plan to delete...) and this past school year have begun following blogs after attending the T.I.C.L 2011 conference and hearing the keynote address by David Warlick.  I was fascinated by the amount of information provided in his address, but also on his blog.  After that conference, I took weekly visits to his blog and continue to follow his blog, today.  

Mr. Warlick's blog was not the only person I wanted to gather new knowledge from during my time in the blogosphere.  I wanted to expand upon the number of blogs I was following as there is a plethora of information out there to learn about!  Have a look, below, at the blogs I am following, and  be sure that you follow this blog MrYtheTechnologyGuy as it will be updated and changed throughout the course of the summer as I learn new things, but also as a tool to be used my students to see the virtual side of Mr. Youngers this coming school year.  Stay tuned for more blogging! 

Blogs I'm following: 
http://drzreflects.blogspot.com/

http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/ 
http://www.joebower.org/ 




You, too, can follow all of these bloggers on Twitter.   @zeitz, @warlick, @joe_bower