Don't start from scratch next school year! Leverage the Resources section in Schoology to save, reuse, and share resources you have created. The following step-by-step directions will walk you through these processes so that you can take what you have developed this year and save for use next year, making modifications where necessary.

In your Personal resources, you have a Home collection of resources, folders and files that you may want to use in your account. A collection is a master area that helps organize all of your saved work. This Home collection exists by default, and it’s only available to you. To share collections of resources with other faculty and connected users, you can create additional collections. To share a newly created Collection with others:

1. Click on Resources/Personal
2. Click on the title of the collection you have created
3. You will see a "Share" button option to select.
4. Once you select the "Share" button, type in the name of the person with whom you want to share the collection of resources.

You can create a collection for every year, for each grading period, or for each course.

Are you a PLC school looking for ways to track your student data to better inform instructional decisions? Are you making the shift from a focus on teaching to a focus on learning? PLCs entail whole-staff involvement in a process of intensive reflection upon instructional practices and desired student benchmarks, as well as monitoring of outcomes to ensure success. PLCs enable teachers to continually learn from one another via shared visioning and planning, as well as in-depth critical examination of what does and doesn’t work to enhance student achievement. Schoology provides many features which can help support these efforts.

Reflection is a crucial element of modern pedagogical systems. Today’s educational practices place a high importance on the ability for students to self-assess and build meta-cognition through reflection. Using Schoology for this task makes this work easy for both the students and teacher. Using digital journals, students can journal on their own device, on a classroom device or from home. 

Building individual discussion threads only one time for each student using Schoology discussions is an easy way to support this practice. The following presentation identifies 4 easy steps to set this up.

• This method provides privacy between you and the student.
• Able to start conversation and follow-ups with students.
• Doesn’t have to be graded/assessed.
• Posts are ongoing, chronological and archived.

Are you ready to start your students in digital journaling? Ask your school Digital Teacher Librarian or Educational Technology Specialist for support in getting started.

Earlier in October, Jeffco hosted the Connect Colorado with Schoology conference at the Ed Center. There were participants from all over Colorado and over 17 school districts, including some travelers from Nebraska and Wyoming. Jeremy Friedman, founder and CEO of Schoology, was the keynote speaker and provided a great overview of the many new features Schoology has added, as well as features that are in various plans of development that will make using Schoology even more robust and efficient.

Teachers are increasingly turning to tools to help support digital workflow in their classrooms. Student online work, discussions, assignment tracking, and instant feedback are some features that digital workflow tools can provide.

Two common tools available for teachers within Jeffco which can support these needs are Schoology and Google Classroom. Jeffco Ed Tech has created a comparison chart to help support the discussions which many schools are having regarding these two tools.

Choosing the best tool for the job always begins with the instructional purpose in mind. Teachers may find they need one or both of these tools at various times throughout the year to help meet their needs.

Digital Teacher Librarians and the Jeffco Ed Tech team are great resources as your school enters into these conversations.

Looking for more information about digital workflow? Read our related blog.

You've conquered the copy machine, those formative assessment tools have no secrets from you, and you've mastered surfing on the web. Now it's time to take your instruction to a new level.

It's time to use Jeffco's Learning Management System, Schoology. Whether you implement one feature or many, you can enhance your instruction and your students' 21st Century learning style through the use of this versatile system, already on all Jeffco computers!

Have you ever needed to prevent students from searching the internet, the computer or another computer application for information during a Schoology test/quiz? If your school has Chromebooks, you can enable a new feature called a kiosk.

What this feature does is it locks down a testing environment. It prevents digital cheating during online tests/quizzes. Students cannot print, copy or go to another website. Additionally, it prevents anyone from accessing other applications when using this feature.

So much to be done! So little time! The pressure on teachers to get everything done by the end of the school day is formidable. How do you cover the curriculum and allow students to be active learners? Take a baby step into the world of Blended Learning. Blended Learning is “blending” the best of both worlds...the face to face interaction of the classroom with the flexibility of online activities such as discussions, video instruction, content delivery, and group work. Whether it is through a 1:1 environment, or the use of just a few student devices/computers in the classrooms, blended learning will save you time and energy in effectively and efficiently covering the content that needs to be covered.

One of the most useful things in presenting digital content is to use a source’s embed code. You can embed many things to your webpage or learning management system, like Schoology, and get rid of paper and textbooks! ​

As many of you are gearing up for CMAS and PARCC assessments, Schoology quizzes can be a wonderful resource already at your fingertips to help students prepare. Whether you are working as a team or department or just by yourself, the Schoology Question Banks can be a real time saver. Every person on a team or in a department can contribute questions to the “bank”. You can then customize a quiz by using any of the stored questions from the bank. Question banks allow you to create a repository of test questions in your Resources. You can create Question Banks in Personal and Group Resources.

Use these great multi-source tab slide presentations in your Schoology course so students can practice navigating between sources. Just embed them on a Schoology discussion, assignment or quiz and provide questions for students to respond to. 

​2 tab multi-source
3 tab multi-source
4 tab multi-source