5 Critical Actions to take in your @Schoology Classroom before the end of the year!
As the school year wraps up and comes to a close … you’ll want to consider a few things to help you end your Schoology course the right way and transition through the summer and into next year.
Here are 5 things you can do to get yourself ready for summer.
Archive Your Schoology Course
If you are a Schoology Enterprise user and have a systems administrator or technology director that handles everything, then you won’t need to do this. If you don’t, then you’ll want to go ahead and archive your own Schoology courses. This will remove it from your current list of active courses but still make it accessible for you to retrieve materials and/or assignments.
Simply click on “courses” → “see all” → click the gear icon next to the course you want to archive → “Archive Section”.
Course Organization
Similar to Google Drive, your Schoology courses can get a little out of control. How you organize them will make it easier for you (and your students). Consider creating a separate folder for every unit you teach at the top level, then creating separate folders within to help manage weekly lessons, projects, or self-paced activities. This will help you transition into next year while also making it easier for you to save stuff to your Schoology resources.
Save to Resources
Think of resources as your personal filing cabinet. By saving your courses or class materials to your resources, you are making it easier to transfer the things you want to reuse next year, while also giving you a place to work on modifying, creating, or rearranging. You can either save your entire course to your Schoology resources (see gif below) or select individual folders/assignments by clicking the gear icon next to the folder or material you want to save → “save to resources” → designate a collection/folder → then “save copy”. Either way, once you do, you can spend time more time creating new assignments right from here!
Unpublish Materials
This one is perfect if you reuse the same course from year to year and do not need to remove anyone from it like I do with my district PD course. By hiding (unpublishing) everything, users aren’t able to access or interact with any course materials. In turn, you can now update and make changes to your course for next year. Simply click the gear icon next to the folder or material you want to hide → then “unpublish”. It will turn gray signifying that this is no longer accessible by others.
Clean Up Schoology Groups
If you are like me, you are connected to a variety of groups in Schoology. Some of these you’ll want to stay are part of. But if you have anything that changes from year to year, like PLC’s, PLN’s, or school clubs/teams, you’ll want to archive or delete these. Archiving will remove it from the list, but you will still be able to retrieve things you might need. Deleting will remove it entirely. Just click “groups” → “see all” → click the gear next to the group you want to modify → then “archive” or “delete”. However, if you want to leave a public group, just go to that group, then locate the “leave this group” option as shown below.
Schoology is a great LMS to help keep your students engaged and organized while also helping to deliver interactive content. However, even Schoology can become bogged down by the amount of content, courses, and groups, you interact with throughout the school year. Follow these tips and you’ll be sure to take control of your digital classroom and transition into the summer and next school year.
Why should school districts adopt Schoology as their LMS?
For the last 3 years, I have had the privilege of leading my school district’s digital transformation using Schoology. Not only is a learning management system like Schoology a great way to help manage the classroom but it is also the perfect way to deliver highly engaging and collaborative digital learning.
If you would like more information about Schoology, please check them out online
If you have additional questions about how you can create awesome lessons with your students, please feel free to reach out to me on Twitter at @Namaraledu.
How are you ending your school year?
We would love to learn how you are ending the school year and preparing your digital classroom for the summer. Please leave a comment below to share your tips and tricks for working with Schoology.
About the author, Nick Amaral
Nick Amaral is a District Staff Development Coordinator in NJ. As a dedicated educator, he is known for implementing technology and differentiating instruction in the classroom. In addition to teaching, he has been responsible for supporting teachers’ understanding and seamless integration of technology in the classroom, as well as designing engaging and thought-provoking professional learning opportunities that meet the needs of all teachers to help to create student-centered learning experiences.