Schoology

Schoology is a web-based learning management system (LMS). Teachers can create and assign a slew of creative tasks, which students can access through the website as well as through iOS, Android, and Chrome apps. While individual teachers can use the free, basic account, schools or districts can pay for the enterprise version, which includes additional audio, student progress, and support features as well as all the administrative features necessary to manage hundreds of users and many different courses.

Course materials can be organized to suit any teacher's style, while the collapsible folder design keeps the page clean and neat. Schoology can use a variety of assignments, such as links to course readings, embed videos, even discussion posts that will engage students in productive conversations. There are also many ways for students to demonstrate learning, like completing quiz or test questions, uploading images or audio, or uploading project files.

Teachers can create assessments and track student performance using Schoology's built-in gradebook. It's fairly flexible, allowing teachers the option to grade by points or percentages. Teachers can also align objectives to each question or assessment or even to an entire course to track student mastery.  Assignments can be set for automatic grading, or rubrics can be created for more detailed feedback. Unlike some other platforms, assessment question styles aren't limited to multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank; instead, Schoology provides 18 question types, including uploading audio or video as well as highlighting and labeling images.

Editor's Note: At the time of this review, users are temporarily prevented from creating Basic accounts due to increased demand caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Teachers from across grade levels and curriculum will find Schoology useful due to its many features and customizability, especially for designing tasks and assessments. It's a perfect platform for skill extension, content scaffolding, and time management, especially for more tech-savvy secondary students who can better navigate the interface and participate. There's no shortage of options to customize the learning environment and differentiate for individual student needs, including but not limited to tons of different assessment types from typical question formats to media contribution. To make organization and workflow easier, unique assignments, assessments, and even whole folders of content can be assigned to individuals or grading groups for easy differentiation. Not only can teachers upload audio or video directions for assignments or assessment questions, but younger students, or students with special needs, can record their responses as well. Teachers can provide quick feedback and communication to students and parents and can keep track of student progress using badges, a gradebook, email/app notifications, and workload monitoring (with the Enterprise version). However, all of this isn't necessarily apparent out-of-the-box, so to speak. So teachers will need to take quite a bit of time to sort through the support materials, play around, and build up their digital classroom piece by piece. However, with thoughtful, gradual implementation and consistent use, students and teachers will be able to upload, create, collaborate, and check progress with relative ease.