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  Maybe you have not used it for 5 years or maybe something you used every year for the last 10 years is now out of date.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.  

Using An LMS

The most powerful tech tool in my classroom is Schoology.  Schoology is a Learning Management System (LMS) that connects with other multi-media to help me deliver coursework, collect assignments, and manage individual students within a course.  

Since our school uses Google Drive and has accounts setup for all students in grades 6 – 12, and all teachers have Google Drive accounts too, the fact that Schoology connects to Google Drive as an app is HUGE! Previous tip shows you how!

I find with many sources I have information readily available about what tech teachers can use in the classroom but rarely do they show or tell us how to use it.  We look at it, say that’s cool, save the email or resource or pin it to a wall of sorts and never really organize it.  Or better yet (sarcastic tone), we are so excited we create “free” accounts on every service, do a lesson here or there but never really blend the assignments.  Sometimes we don’t go back to the projects or reuse them because they are hard to organize. For that reason alone is why I use Schoology.  Schoology allows me to organize all the other resources (tech or not tech) into one location and deliver those resources to students AND collect assignments back from students.  I can organize my lessons, align units, lessons, assignments to standards and use all the tech I want.  Now listen, I don’t work for Schoology, they didn’t pay me, and well maybe someone that runs their Twitter page might know I exist LOL. To convince you to start using Schoology in your classroom may take more than one blog post, and I’m OK with that.  But honestly this is one account you should go create now if you haven’t already.  And login to it if you created it but never used it.

To get started, create an account.

Then create a course

From here you can organize your course.  I use the free version of Schoology in my classroom so some of the utilities are not available to me but I have all I need to stay organized.  Since we use Google Drive I have my students create their own Schoology account using their Google Drive login information.  Then I give them the course access code to join my class.  

https://www.schoology.com/learning-management-system.php#basic