PE5 – Schoology

Schoology was the second of the Web 2.0 tools that I learned for the Relevant and Innovative Learning Scenario (RILS) project. It  merges two worlds, education and social media. At first, I thought that Schoology would be user friendly. Some of the components were and some were not. Here is what the instructor sees to create components for the course.

Instructor View of Schoology

Creating the course about Google+, I found easy. All that was required was creating pages, inserting text and graphics as applicable. Looking back I could have possibly added a movie to it.

To create the space for the course was also easy. Where I had difficulty was finding the access code so I could give it to my potential students. To locate the access code, first you need to go into the applicable course, then click edit members that is located on the left, and finally you can see the code. Without the code, student cannot access the course.

Another area of difficulty was the grade book. It appears that it gets populated once a student is given the access code and logs in. Jena Wayt was nice enough to test this with me so I could attempt to add items to the grade book. For future, testing I will create a fictitious student so I can test my own course. The next thing I had to create was a weight category for grading. This had to be attached to my assignments in order for them to appear in the grade book. I wanted to add a threaded discussion to the grade book. This was not a feature of the interface. What I could do was create an assignment, remove the dropbox, and provide a link to the threaded discussion from there. It did work with the fictitious student I created.

There is one cool thing that Schoology does for the instructor. It sends e-mails anytime something happens in a course to keep you aware of it. In addition, once I create my assessment, I will put a link into an assignment so the students have quicker access. Lastly, once I did some research about the product and received assistance from Jena Wayt and Dr McBride for their assistance.