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!