Schoology

I have been using Schoology for approximately five years now and I find it to be the easiest LMS with the most features of all the other ones I’ve tried. It is so easy to organize in whatever way is most convenient for you and your course. It supports video uploads from multiple different kinds of sources whether be YouTube or Loom or Edpuzzle. Students love the use of badges where teachers can send “gold star” encouragement to students like “most improved” or other distinctions. Students can easily email their teachers through Schoology. Course updates allow for whole class communication. The pro list goes on and on.

The biggest con I have experienced occasionally rears its head when I try to sync Schoology to PowerSchool. I find that some assignments will not sync. Even after I go through all of the usual troubleshooting details such as having a due date or the assignment title being too long, nothing will get it to sync. This is not a huge problem maybe one assignment and 50. What is frustrating, is that when you go into the sync page the error listed doesn’t tell you what to look for us just simply says “failed the sync.

Another frustration I have is when I want to unpublished material to students In Schoology that unpublished material is then unpublished in PowerSchool. Just because I want to on publish it in Schoology does it mean I want their grades in assignments to be unseen in PowerSchool.

I found the folders setup to be very helpful so all content, assignments, and resources could be placed in the same folder. Sub-folders could also be added. Mimicking a computer storage system was helpful to many students. Next, the album feature was also very beneficial to display student work in a virtual environment. Also, badges can be given to students for positive reinforcement motivation. Finally, it was helpful to integrate tools such as Microsoft or Google products.

Due to having many folders, there is a lot of clicking for students to get to an assignment. Late assignments are marked missing and the teacher must manually make the correction. It would be helpful to see a list of missing work.

Nothing. Don't know why the administration purchased it. It was not worth the money. Most parents we know can't find anything in there and need multiple trainings.

Too many features, too many folders, trying to find anything on there is like looking for a needle in a haystack. iI is not intuitive at all - this company needs some apple developers on their staff. Fails to facilitate the most common uses for parents and students, with a focus on easy grade reporting and ease of accessing current assignments and the instructions from the teacher. I can't find anything in here. No parents I know like this software.