Use Your LMS to Organize Your Year

I posted my reasons for using a learning management system (LMS) for organizing your classroom and delivering content to students in the past. An LMS can be a great organizational tools for teachers to use to organize their year even if there is no intent of having students login to the online classroom.  I believe the LMS is a better way to deliver assignments than posting links to your webpage but having a classroom webpage can be a great start to get all students on the same page.

Today’s tip is about using the LMS to organize you independent of student work. I choose to work with Schoology.  I use Schoology because students can upload content from a number of different resources and it links with Google Drive, YouTube, Khan Academy, etc.  The difference with something like Google Classroom or Learning.com is proprietary software is designed for sharing their resources and I like a little more variety and control. I can setup my entire classroom, align standards to assignments, and set due dates and see them in a calendar.  Even if I print out PDF pages or never collect an assignment online I’m able to archive the entire course and the next time I teach it add or remove resources. 

See how I have folders for each Unit with a description of what’s in the unit.  

Then if you look inside those units you can see individual resources sometimes links to other websites, sometimes a video, and sometimes a discussion post or assignment.

Have you ever saved something to use later?  Maybe you have not used it for 5 years or maybe something you used every year for the last 10 years is now out of date.  You don’t have to get rid of the file, but you can take it out of your course.  I save things to my Resources if I don’t want to get rid of it but it doesn’t pertain to this course this year.

Use the LMS to organize you! This works for all grades!  Then all you have to do is login to the LMS from any computer to access the content.  No worries about forgetting your flash drive or you forgot to charge your laptop, just login to another computer because the LMS stores everything in the cloud.