Techtrend

Hello everyone, the tool I chose to do for this week is called Schoology. I found it under Learning Analytics in the K-12 Edition of the Horizon Report. I am very excited about this tool it can do so much and it's perfect for what I've been looking for. So here we are on the Schoology.com website and I have already created my teacher version of it. And here the page is like any other social media site. So these are all the updates I have posted on each of my courses, which are each of my class periods. If students were to reply or add things, they would also show up like a news feed here. If you scroll down, it's just welcoming me I can customize my profile add a picture. Off to the right are suggested apps and upcoming assignments on the calendar that I have for the students already. So up here are my different courses so I have five classes a day so I made five different courses one for each period. You can create groups similar to small groups on Google+. I am going to go to my fourth period class. As you can see here, you can create assignments, tests/quizzes, you can upload files/links, you can create discussions, you can upload pictures, and you can add page links. These are all the same materials that is showing now. You can add updates, which would be posts such as reminding students when assignments are due, or when new assignments are posted. I'll show you what that looks like. So it's just like any other posts and you can see the one I've already done. There is a grade book. Now obviously I made these students up and I took the tests for them so this is all made up information, but it's really cool how when they took the quiz it automatically went into the grade book. Badges is pretty cool too you can give badges to students based on the different categories they have here. You can keep track of attendance this isn't what I'm going to be using this for, but I think that's also pretty cool. You can see the class roster. And you can go to the analytics link if it works here. There we go. So here you can do your overall course. You can go o individual users and it gives you that information. You can go to individual assignments so we have the tobacco quiz or I'm sorry the alcohol quiz and the tobacco interview. Up here in course options you can send a message, which you can also do up here as well. You can edit information you can edit the privacy and all of that. Alright I'm going to get to the good stuff now. First of all when you have a student sign up for Schoology depending on what class periods they're in or however you organize it you're going to give them this access code down at the bottom. So for all of my fourth period students I am going to give them this code in order to sign up for the class. So when they go to first sign up for Schoology it's going to ask for an access code they enter it then they're able to sign up and it'll automatically put them into my fourth period. It's like that for each period each period has it's own access code. Ok I'm going to go back to materials. I'm going to go to the quiz that I already created. Here you can add or create a new one, you can bulk edit all the assignments you have. Let me go back. And you can edit the quiz you can unpublish it add to the folder copy to course. So this is very important. I didn't realize this until after I played with this website for a while, but you can copy the same quiz to each course so I'm just going to click on it to show you. And I would just check each course and press copy. I've already done this so I'm not going to do it again, but it saves you a lot of time.The only thing you'll have to do is you'll have to go into each class period and change the settings for each that doesn't transfer over, but the quiz itself does and it saves you a lot of time. I'm going to click on the quiz and I've only added three students to my class, but it's really cool I have allowed them to take 10 attempts because the goal of this quiz is for them to get all the questions correct. So here you can see the number of attempts you can see the last time they attempted it and you can see the grades for each. You can also view their attempts, which is very helpful information. Ok so Marysa Beech you can see she's attempted two times you can see when she started and finished the amount of time it took her her actual score. Now obviously I did this and I went through and just clicked answers to get done and then you can actually view her answers. So this is I think very very important to see what questions students are missing what students students have right from the get go. What I might have to go back and reteach. Ok that's submissione one. You can also go to submission two you can see she got the first question correct that time. And settings you can do a lot of cool things too. So you can type in directions or whatever you'd like them to do. As you can see, you can add in links and files there is so much you can do with this tool. You can make it available now or now until... and it will automatically cut off. You can hide it you don't want students to be able to see it. You can add a time limit. Here you can have them do it from unlimited to 20 times and I picked 10 times. And it's going to be graded by the highest school of course. You could change that. You can change the order. I'm sorry one question per page. I have it so that they can review all their answers before they submit it. You can click yes you can click yes with correct answers so they can see the answers they have chosen, but maybe you don't want them to see the correct answer and you want them to eventually figure it out. Ok so we're going to go back to the materials. And I've also created a discussion which you can see over to the right here. It tells them when these are due. I'm going to click on the discussion. And you can see what students in the class have actually responded to the discussion. View stats will take you to the analytics page. And again you can edit, unpublish, copy to course which I've already one, or delete. You can delete a students post if you don't think it's appropriate. Now as you can see I have five notifications every time a student submits something or when they sign up for the page or whatever it is you'll get a notification and I have it set up to where it goes directly to me email. You can also set it up to where you'll get a text on your phone. So it tells you here what my fake students have done recently, which is also very helpful. Ok I hope this has been beneficial for you i am still learning this tool, but I've already thought of many ways that I can use this in my class. I have used it on the computer and I've always used it on my phone because that's how I want students to reach it is through the Schoology app on their phone or devices that way they can just quickly click on it and submit whatever it is I want them to do whether it's just a quick entrance or exit slip, which would be just a mini quiz. Or if it's just a discussion I want them to do. That's basically it that I'm going to be using it for. I might add more things when I get a better feel of it. Again I hope this was useful for you I hope that you can use it in your classes and I look forward to seeing what everyone else has come up with.