My LMS Schoology

At the end of the 2019-2020 school year, our School Board set aside several days for our teachers and administrators to complete grades while spending the daytime doing professional development, processing the year, and preparing for 2020-2021. We have two high schools in our district, each with a Director of Instructional Technology. Lisa Berhoff and Dan Kim put together a program named "S.O.S.": Schoology on Schoology. Their work is thorough and for me enlightening, instructive. Although during the months of the beginning of the pandemic I learned much more than I knew before about Schoology, and I used it constantly, there were, and still are, features about which I continue to learn. Those few days were like trying to complete my CARLA institute "Using the Web for Communicative Language Learning" within 9 days, while finishing grading, developing plans for the first several weeks of classes, and starting our development of approaches to remote learning in general for the entire year, among other activities. These last few days I have gone back to Schoology to better prepare myself for using it. 

From my readings last week, here is one article that reviews Schoology: https://diigo.com/0i3l58 

I tried using Diigo on this, even though I am not clear on how Diigo seems to be going with me everywhere now! The title "Educational Technologies for Online and Blended Learning in Medical Science" Gaiz and Masoway (2018) demonstrates how tools may be used across content areas. 

What they said about Schoology:

• The foundation is a mixture of a social platform and a learning management system (LMS).
• It allows collaboration student to student, student to teacher, teacher to teacher.
• Schoology is cited as aiding in increased motivation and achievement for students, and more efficiency for teachers.
• "Using Schoology as a mixed learning strategy to teach literature increased student motivation and was associated with a positive attitude towards learning. 

What I want to pursue:

• To review the different ways that students can collaborate for communicative tasks.
• To complete a family guide to platforms used in World Languages at my school, with a base in communication using Schoology.
• To research teaching literature through Schoology.
• To review and use community builders that are presented in S.O.S. 
• To create some interviews with colleagues presenting our department members, the department's norms for remote learning, and including another community builder. 

One of my CARLA colleagues Alexis Vallbona presented an activity for the Interpretive Mode. What I saw was a colorful, well-planned interview for students to connect with his niece in Spain, close to their age. From that, I've begun to imagine and plan a type of dashboard page that could be placed in Schoology that links to different google forms. The google form could have the short video in the Maria/Alexis vein that ends with a community building activity: two truths and a lie. This is similar to our CARLA question used as a community builder, that asked us to tell our new community something that others may not ever guess about us. Today, when I went to Schoology for another refresher, in the S.O.S. two truths and a lie also appeared. Sounds like that was meant to be. I need to start recruiting my colleagues. The difficult part may be trying to use iMovie, as did Alexis (The special effects are very professional looking, fun, appealing.), but with something other than the Skype add-on that he mentioned. 

For my colleagues in CARLA: Does anyone know if there is another tool out there that would be as clear as the split screen that Alexis used for his interview, that may be used with iMovie? Maybe I should also see if iMovie works with Google and Schoology.

Also for my colleagues: does anyone already know what the authors of my research are talking about as related to using literature and Schoology?

Regarding community builders, after my first session of CARLA's "Critical Approaches to Heritage Language Learning", I now have seen one of the community builders in use! "Take a picture!" It was a great, low stress activity, that got us moving out of our seats in a class that runs virtually from 9am - 4 pm. I would like to share the ConceptBoard Blog that was used for S.O.S.'s icebreakers: https://conceptboard.com/blog/icebreakers-in-virtual-teams/

Lastly, the Schoology review does NOT mention parent/teacher communication. I wonder what are different ways to engage them somehow THROUGH Schoology. This was one of the only things that made communication cumbersome this past spring.