TrustRadius Insights for Schoology Learning are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Business Problems Solved
Schoology is a versatile Learning Management System used by school districts, educators, and students to enhance the learning experience and streamline communication. Teachers rely on Schoology to create and share resources, post assignments, and assess student progress. It also serves as a platform for coordinating school groups, athletic activities, and building school culture. With Schoology, educators can easily communicate with families, manage events and assignments, collect feedback, generate discussions, and facilitate formal assessments. Students benefit from Schoology by accessing course materials, assignments, study materials, and participating in interactive class discussions. Parents appreciate the platform's ability to keep them informed about their child's progress through regular updates and messages from teachers. Additionally, Schoology has been widely adopted by entire school districts as their preferred LMS due to its effectiveness in addressing differentiation, collaboration, and communication needs. Beyond the classroom, Schoology is also utilized by organizations for professional development, communication, collaboration, and training purposes. Overall, Schoology offers a user-friendly interface that simplifies the transition to paperless classrooms while providing valuable tools for both educators and students alike.
I love using Schoology because it does help students with learning their assigned subjects. I have used this program and it is comparable to Google Classroom but what sets it apart, in my opinion, is the way that the lessons and visuals are laid out which makes it easier for the students to get on the same page as the teacher. It is a great program to use and the New York City Department of Education uses it widely in their remote learning package available to students.
Pros
Project-Based Learning.
Improved Student Engagement.
Empowering Students with Technology.
Cons
Functionality does lag a bit at times.
I would like to see an improved dashboard.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think Schoology Learning is well suited for the remote learning that school districts are embarking on because of the ongoing Covid pandemic and it serves as a good learning platform for all students because it is similar to Google Classroom but I would say it is a much more improved interface.
Schoology is used as a platform for giving assignments, scoring them, and providing feedback to students. All teachers in my school district are mandated to use it to keep track of student grades. There are benefits in general to electronic gradebooks over paper ones, of course, but that said, this system has so many problems it's hard to know where to begin.
Pros
allows teachers to upload Google docs, sheets, etc. as assignments
allows integration with our school's report card system (grades in gradebook are automatically imported to report cards for families)
allows different teachers to save and share materials by saving them to Resources
Cons
In general, the system is NOT intuitive and there is a lack of customization across all aspects of it. Far too much clicking is required for many tasks. Some examples follow...
When typing comments on assignment, the default is to NOT show the comments to students--for students to see, you must click a box before submitting and there is no way to change that setting.
There is no way to create a bank of frequently used comments (e.g. "This is plagiarized", "Good job!", "You need to edit more carefully", etc.), so the teacher must type comments manually for each assignment.
Once assignments are marked missing, late submissions are still marked missing and there is no automatic way to change this. Teachers must go in and manually remove the "missing" marks from any assignments submitted late. This is a huge hassle, considering our district does not want us to refuse late work.
In consideration of the movement towards mastery grading, there is no way to customize the value of a missing assignment; it can only be zero. Any equity-focused district encourages teachers NOT to count missing assignments as zeroes. The value of missing work was customizable in the Illuminate gradebook that my school previously used.
"Mark empty cells missing" (bulk feature) does not mean "all cells without a submission"; it means "all cells without a grade." You cannot easily mark multiple assignments missing at the same time without then going to manually remove the missing mark from those students who HAVE submitted something that you have not yet had time to grade.
There is no way to sort students by who has the most ungraded work, which would be very helpful in prioritizing.
If a student takes a quiz late, their score does NOT automatically populate. Teacher must go in to view the score and then manually enter it. This is incredibly annoying at a school with a high absence rate.
Assignments submitted late are just marked "late" instead of time-stamped and there is no way to sort late assignments by the order they were submitted. I do not want to grade the work of students who turned in everything the last week of the semester before those who only turned things in one day late.
The Bulk Edit feature does not allow you to change the lock date (last date an assignment will be accepted). Lock dates for assignments must be set and changed individually, which I learned the hard way.
My experience with the mobile app was so frustrating that I never use it. It would be amazing if I could grade student work from my phone, but it's totally confusing.
Likelihood to Recommend
There HAVE to be better-designed learning management systems out there. My suspicion is that this company was the lowest bidder. I have been forced to use it for four years and I have seen few improvements during that time. Teachers are never asked for their input on the system or how to make it better, which is what brings me here. I literally have no idea whom to approach with these issues.
We use Schoology Learning for a learning management system. Student access classes, assignments, tests, and communicate with teachers through the platform. Schools and teachers can decide to use Schoology or Google Classroom.
Pros
Assessments - Much more interactive and have more grading options than Google Forms
Auto-rostering - We are able to use Infinite Campus to automatically roster classes and there are no extra steps
Family/Guardian access - Schoology allows families to have a sign in and see student grades & work.
Cons
Intuitiveness - Some sections are clunky and need extra people to help figure it out
Student view - You can view pages as students, but can't really experience sample tests and such
Likelihood to Recommend
While I don't have experience with Schoology for littles, I have heard it is not very easy to navigate for lower elementary students. However, secondary students seem to do very well with it.
We are using Schoology Learning as our primary means of educational delivery to both on-site and virtual students throughout the course of the pandemic. Using it has allowed us to keep some sense of instructional delivery intact while some students are at the school and some are not. Additionally, it will be able to be supplemental training material in the future when we do return to full-time attendance.
Pros
Ease of use for the students
Allows for organization that fits different instructional models
Straightforward interface that allows both teacher and student to easily navigate.
Cons
Reliability
Lack of frequent synchronization
Victims of their own success
Likelihood to Recommend
Schoology does the job well enough, but there are enough areas of contention that make advanced use of the system unwieldy. District staff does not have easy reporting ability to determine adoption and use of the platform without having to export to another program for analysis. The reliability of the system is a huge pain point as we need to deliver the curriculum but cannot count on it being available when we need to use it.
Schoology is used across the district as an online learning platform that is used for both synchronous and asynchronous learning. It allows us to use less paper by having assignments online, which also mitigates challenges with students losing paper copies. Additionally, it allows for linked assignments with Google Drive for easy storage, real time viewing for feedback, and rubrics attached to assignments for easy grading.
Pros
Easy to use gradebook.
Links assignments to Google Drive.
Attached rubrics for grading.
Completion markers.
User friendly.
Cons
Analytics need to be updated more frequently (once every hour would be ideal).
Notifications need to be more visible, otherwise students often ignore them.
Likelihood to Recommend
Schoology has been useful since before the pandemic, but has become even more since. It allows for electronic documents that are easily stored, nothing gets lost, and no copies need to be made. It also enables students to see where they are in their work, always have access to the gradebook, and have clarity on what needs to get done. It provides options for synchronous or asynchronous work (or both, in some cases). I personally really enjoy using it as a platform for teaching.
Schoology is being utilized in St. Mary's County Public Schools as our primary Learning Management System. It helps us to reach both in-person and virtual students through the organization of materials and the implementation of blended teaching strategies embedded with technology. We have users Pre-K through 12 grade using this as a primary source of curriculum materials and grading.
Pros
Organize materials.
Keeps students on track with assignment.
Report grades to all stakeholders.
Cons
It doesn't break down the grading/materials in to marking periods.
There's no mass excusal process for new students.
Analytics of usage for students doesn't address all the data required by the school system.
Likelihood to Recommend
Schoology is a great classroom organizer for curriculum materials. Assessments have a wonderful variety of item types and offer multiple ways for students to show mastery. Assignments can easily integrate with Kami or Google and also allow for other types of submissions to allow students additional ways to show mastery.
We use Schoology district wide for our students. All students and staff use this and we have found it to be a powerful tool especially during these remote learning months. The teachers have adopted it and are happy to have a product that works well. Without Schoology, I'm not sure how we would have successfully gotten through the distance learning process.
Pros
Allows students and staff to work in one place
All systems we use filter through Schoology making it a very useful tool
Students have taken to it very well and have enjoyed the user friendly feel
Cons
The single sign on piece needs work
The use of additional apps would be great
Likelihood to Recommend
This was extremely helpful for the distance learning with our elementary students. It created a place to have all of our k-5 staff and students to work and collaborate. This allowed the teachers to focus on teaching and not the technology or the tools we use. I'm grateful that we had a system that allowed for this.
Our whole organization is driven by Schoology Learning, a PowerSchool Unified Classroom. All interdepartmental communication is conducted through Schoology Learning, a PowerSchool Unified Classroom, as well as the bulk of instruction for this hybrid school year. When it comes to addressing business problems, at this point it seems that Schoology Learning, a PowerSchool Unified Classroom is our business. We as teachers spend five to six hours a day using it, as do our students.
Pros
Organization of instructional materials
Streamlines the process of creating lessons
Easily allows teachers to integrate programs such as NearPod, Google Sheets, etc.
Cons
We have had several instances this year where the program crashed district wide. Possibly due to overload?
Some programs, like Kami, do not work as smoothly as they should within the program.
The training is intensive for the program. There has to be a way to make it easier for kids to use.
Likelihood to Recommend
If your lessons require a ton of content and materials to be readily available, Schoology Learning, a PowerSchool Unified Classroom is the program for you! Once you get the hang of it, it is fairly easy to use as a teacher. If you only need to post a video and a worksheet a week, then Schoology Learning, a PowerSchool Unified Classroom may be overpowered!
This is the high school’s relearning platform. It is used for student assignments, status of work, and teachers posting resources.
Pros
Poor navigation
No summary Information
Little to no support
Cons
Support is terrible
No simple way to view assignments and status
Extremely arcane and difficult navigation for users
Likelihood to Recommend
I would have given this product a negative rating if that were possible. The usability and ability for parents to see and track assignments is abysmal.
Our school uses Schoology as a Learning Management System. As teachers we submit our lesson plans on there. We use the resources to store our units and assignments. We post our assignments for students. Students retrieve assignments, videos and use subscriptions with SSOs. They can also take assessments, have discussions and answer polls in their class.
Parents can monitor their students assignments and keep track of what is due and when.
Pros
Single Sign-On for Subscriptions. This is very good especially for the elementary grades. One point of access, one URL to remember.
Syncing with SMS. We use RenWeb and it works well with them.
Assessments are easy to set up and you can save questions on the question in the question bank for use later on.
Enterprise - control of users and their profiles.
Cons
Ability to remove an assignment that was uploaded to the wrong place or has a mistake.
Change the order of students names in the submitted assignment section.
Date to end/close a poll.
Likelihood to Recommend
Assignment management. I always had stacks of papers to grade. Now that there is one place to submit (not my email), this works wonderfully. Ability to have one place to store and retrieve materials without uploading over and over to a program. SSOs are a wonderful addition to have instead of moving from site to site.