Great Social Learning Platform / LMS with many advanced features in the free version.

Submitted 8 years ago
My Rating
Pedagogy
Supports

My Take

I love Schoology. I began using it back in 2011, and it is still the platform I recommend to teachers and schools who are looking to try out a free learning management system or social learning platform. My biggest complaint is a lack of integration with Renweb. Because of that, we still do not use it as our primary grading system, as it would require entering in grades twice. However, the level accessibility (there are mobile apps), organization, features and support are awesome.

How I Use It

I helped our high school adopt Schoology as our learning management system. Schoology is a bit of a cross between Moodle and Edmodo. It is not nearly as customizable and complex as Moodle, but it offers a richer feature set than Edmodo. All of our high school teachers post class materials, information and announcements on Schoology. Some of us also do minor assessments and discussions though the site. Our students seem to prefer it to Edmodo, and they even organize some of their own clubs, groups and events through Schoology.

Being an international private school with regular teacher turnover, it's important to have a tool that doesn't take a lot of time to learn and master. With Moodle, by the time our teachers got really comfortable using it, their contracts were up and they were off to another school. With Schoology, our teachers can get their classes up and running with little difficulty. The paid Enterprise version offers even more functionality and integration with services like Turnitin, but since it does not integrate with Renweb, our student information system, we are still using the free version. The free version, however, does integrate with Google Apps and Khan Academy.