Speaker 1: So, what I always like to pull apart first to make sure we're all on the same page is just to find these different drop-downs in Schoology, because many people who may have been using Schoology even for a year may not be clued into these specific pieces. Courses. This is where all the formal learning happens in Schoology, where the instruction happens. This is where grades are reported. This is where you assign work to students. There's a formal relationship between the instructor and the learner in courses. Groups on the other hand represent all of the other places that people interact and learn together in an organization. So, for instance, you may have your extracurricular activities in groups. You may have your athletics team communicate in groups. You also might use groups for your professional learning community, faculty-level groups or department-level groups. Resources are basically your digital filing cabinet in Schoology. Sometimes before you are ready to distribute materials in your courses, you want to get them organized. Resources are a great place to do that. If we look at this teacher's account, Kylie Starr here, notice her courses drop down. This is where her formal courses are. And then the groups. She's the coach of the women's soccer team, also sponsors a poetry club, but she's also part of the faculty group within this. This is a school district scenario, but you might have the same thing in corporate learning or higher education as well. And then for resources, again, this is like her digital filing cabinet where she can store all these materials. So we'll touch on all of these today, but we're going to focus on courses because that's usually where everyone starts off. Let's jump into her social sciences course. Everything we add in Schoology, we're doing through this add materials drop down. This is your basic building block. This is probably not new news to most of you, but sometimes when you see that blank slate, you want to know where to start. This is where to start. And the reason why I want everyone to be familiar with this area in the beginning is when you go digital, the first thing that you should do is help yourself out. There are a lot of things you can do to help students personalize their learning, create individual assignments, things like that. First things first, let's you get you away from the copy machine. I hate rushing to class, making copies, and then realize the copy machine has jammed and then my whole lesson could be out the window. So the best thing you can do for yourself is start by putting those files online, both for yourself and for your students to access. For instance, if they leave your handouts in their locker, this gives them another option. Before we add files to the course, notice what I have in my course. I have a few folders. This is a unit on inventions that I'm teaching, and this is actually divided into subfolders. And there is my PowerPoint slide, what I'm going to use to present from. Now before you add files, what I would suggest doing is add some folders to keep yourself organized as you add those files. So how should you organize your folders? Looking at the handout for today, there are a couple different ways to do this, and it's a personal preference. I always suggest people create their folders in the same way they would create folders in the physical world. It's always really useful to try to replicate the digital world alongside the physical world, so it's not a completely new environment. Start where you are. For instance, if you're teaching primary school, you may only be using Schoology for organizing things for yourself, and then posting certain activities for students. This scenario breaks your folders into past activities, future activities. Notice that this folder is hidden, so this is a place where I can get things organized without my students jumping into them. But the current activity, I'm actually pulling right up to the top here, this link to Quizlet Study Aid. We see that in this scenario here. Past activities, future activities, and here is my current item. Note that I can drag and drop that, so once my students have finished with this, I can actually put it into this folder to study links. Especially for your younger learners, always be really flexible with this area and just pull the current activity up to the top. Now going a step further here, once you get into the upper grades, you might want to organize things by weeks, for instance. So I've organized them as such here. This way, my students can go right into the current topic, and I can keep things really organized. I can keep organized year after year so I can reuse these materials next year and know where everything is. We see that scenario in this version of the course. But you know what? Once I finish with week one, I can move that to the bottom of the list, so my students always have the current lesson at the top. And looking inside this folder, there's the activity for this item. Now I work primarily with more mature students or adult learners, so I follow a model more like this. I break things into units and then have the lessons under the units. This keeps you really well organized. This is also what you might do if you have a curriculum team who actually pulls this information together for a lot of other teachers. And this is the scenario that we'll look at today. So with folders, let's talk about some basic navigation. And this is one of those things, if you've been using Schoology for a while, whenever I show this, a lot of people don't realize you can do this. When you're going through the folders, many people click right into them to see the subfolders. Instead, do this. Click that arrow to the left so you can expand all of these folders. Next, you can drag and drop any of these items. So I can move this around in and outside of the folder. Now if I go ahead and click the Add Materials button here to add a file, which is what we're going to do, this would actually add it to the bottom of my course here. But I actually want this right inside the folder. So hover your mouse actually inside the folder, and you'll see this green dotted line here. If you click that green dotted line, you'll see that same menu. And here I can add a new file. Attach files. Again, great tip. You can actually upload 10 files at once if you like. Here's a Word doc I want my students to use. And now I've added this right where I want it after these PowerPoint presentations. And when we add things to Schoology, any of these standard documents, note that they all preview right inside the platform. This is a presentation provided by Purdue's online writing lab. So those are some fundamentals. As soon as you start doing these techniques, you'll start creating content quite a bit faster. So we click the green dotted line, Add Files. This is also where you would add links. So the same way I can go out to this quiz here and quizlet that I know many of you use. Click the green dotted line. Same way I add files, I could simply add that link here as well and automatically grab the title. So that's going to really just streamline all of your workflow. All the teachers that I've talked to who start simply doing this, providing files and links online, they say they have quite a bit more teaching time simply because they're not spending time handing out papers. I'll go ahead and move that into this folder. There's another way you can add files as well. Instead of adding them right to the course, that works really well for these PowerPoint presentations because this is keeping me organized and I can open these presentations. My students can view them beforehand. I could even present right from here. But what happens with those homework assignments where I want to give my students a handout, but I want to grade it, I want to give some context to it, I want to give instructions to the students on how to use it? When I uploaded this Word document, this is that document that I just added, well, there are no instructions here for my students. It's just a graphic organizer for them, but I really want to give some instructions here. Well, let's do this a different way. Going back in, clicking the gear icon. I'll go ahead and delete this item so we can see how we'll do it differently. This is where you would instead create an assignment, a test, discussion, or a page. When you create any of these items, instead, you can attach those files and links directly to the assignment and give instructions here. And that's the big difference. So all of these items, assignments, tests, quizzes, discussions, and pages, attach those handouts directly to the items. This also allows you to assign things like due dates. It opens up the possibility of grading and everything else. That is often a missing piece of people getting started with Schoology. Here's a question for you all. I've been talking about uploading files, but I know that a lot of you also have your files on Google Drive or SkyDrive or Dropbox, other places. You are already in the digital universe, which may be why you've joined us today. So we don't want you to reinvent the wheel here. Let's get some quick feedback. We have about half of the responses in right now. I'll just give this a few more seconds. This is what you all just said. 16% mostly on paper still, 45% on a network drive, 40% in Google, Dropbox, or OneDrive. So those of you who have items on paper, you may think about scanning those items into a digital format or taking some time and finally putting them in Microsoft Word or jumping right into Google Drive to get those going. So how do we get those items that are already in the cloud? This is where resources come into play. Remember when we first started a few minutes ago, I talked about resources being Schoology's digital filing cabinet. Well, sure, you can take all these items and save them directly in Schoology, but if you are already in the digital universe, we don't want to reinvent the wheel here. Click the resources dropdown and then click this apps option here. This will prompt you to install any apps that you want to use with Schoology. If your items are already in Dropbox, simply install the Dropbox app, sign in, and you can move any of those materials right into your courses in the exact same way that we just saw, either directly into the course or attaching it to an assignment. In a similar way, if you're attaching it to an assignment, something like that. Right where we saw the ability to click add file or add link here, the third button are your resources. If you've connected Dropbox or Google Drive, something like that, click this icon and it will open up your Google Drive right inside of Schoology and you can attach to that assignment from here. Or if you want to add something directly to the course, click import from resources and that file will instead just be added directly to a folder. Exactly the same techniques as we just saw, just going about it in a slightly different way. Now I want to present one other option. Give a quick shout out if you are an art teacher or a music teacher in the questions area. Just give a quick shout out if there are any art or music teachers with us today. Because the next item is for you all. Add materials, add media album. If a lot of your content is images, if they are audio files like mp3s or videos, you may want to explore media albums. That is a really fun extra option that puts all of those media pieces into a nice thumbnail gallery. That could be a really nice option for you. So Kelsey, from the questions that we've been seeing here and what we just talked about, what are some of the best practices and some of the common things we can solve with adding files and links to our courses?

Speaker 2: I think it's really important to be mindful of the fact that when students come to your course materials page, they're seeing that as a road map for both your marking period and also for their navigation in school. So especially when you're using it primarily for files and links, it's important to either add them into a folder that's clearly labeled and visually different from everything else on the page, or to add them to an assignment or page and add some instruction, add some text around those file links to give some guidance to your students. I think that's always important with online learning. But the good thing about folders is once you have figured out a good road map for your course is that, like we were saying, you don't need to reinvent the wheel. You can save it. You can copy it to other courses. You can copy it to your resources and reuse it again later. We did have some questions about mobility of folders. Would you mind just showing us quickly how you can copy between sections?

Speaker 1: That's a great question. Now some of you in the Enterprise version of Schoology may be using something that came out this summer called section linking, where you can actually link several of your sections together if they use the same materials. What you were doing last year was clicking this gear icon and selecting copy to courses. This allows you to copy this folder to all these other courses. Similarly, you can save this to your resources if you want to use it next year, or even if you want to share it with another instructor. What's very cool about this year is note that these social studies courses are separate. This freshman writing course is actually three different sections. This is something that is special to Enterprise users in Schoology. Clicking see all, so I just went to courses and see all. This shows me all of my courses on one page. If I want these social studies courses to be managed in one place, like this freshman writing course is, I'm going to select what I would consider the master course, my main course where I want to build everything. Selecting the gear icon, I select this link section option. Here I will link these two sections to section A. If I do this, it will roll them up like my freshman writing course. Anything I create there will actually show up in all classes at once. That's your best option. It's a really terrific feature. No more copying things back and forth. When you do this, it still keeps your roster separate, so your grade books will be separate. If you're using an SIS sync, all those grades still go to the different course sections in, for instance, PowerSchool, but you can manage your materials in one place.

Speaker 2: This is good if you have multiple sections, so completely different sets of enrollments but you're using the same exact materials for all of those three or four sections of students. You'll notice it's grayed out here on Brad's screen because there are certain criteria that sections have to meet in order to be linked. If you hover, you get a little tooltip telling you what the issue is. The other thing to note is that this has to be turned on by your system administrator. If you're not seeing this option, you should contact your system admin. If you are a system admin, go to the permissions page to turn it on.

Speaker 1: That's right. Great new feature. Definitely use it, especially in junior high, high school levels where often teachers are teaching multiple sections of the same course. One of those other constraints worth mentioning, it has to be the same teacher. You have to be teaching both. You can't link sections that other teachers are teaching. And the students need to be different in those courses. So you'll see this grayed out version if you don't meet those criteria.

Speaker 2: We've got a lot of excited teachers on the line right now.

Speaker 1: This is a terrific feature. While we're here, let me show you what that looks like in this linked version of Freshman Writing. This is in three sections. And now, if I, for instance, add a discussion, which is what we're going to do next, the due dates look different. It's a one discussion topic, but I can actually click Select Sections to Customize if my classes actually meet on different days. And they can each have a different due date.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And it's important to know that this is not a discussion between all of your sections. This will create a copy of the discussion in each of your sections.

Speaker 1: Exactly. And in a similar way, if these three are a standard course, but these are AP and they're going to get a different discussion, I can hide this discussion in those sections. So this gives you a single source for materials, but still gives you the flexibility to customize things. So definitely check this out if you have not seen it in your system before.

Speaker 2: Definitely. Thanks for showing us that.

Speaker 1: Based on those various options, how do you imagine tomorrow, this week, next week, as students are coming back, or if you're an international, students are already totally in the swing of things. Of those options, how do you think you're going to be using those items? Let's view those results. So great to see so many of you really wanting to go all the way and attach those handouts to things like assignments and discussions. That's a great way to go. But if you want to just work in the shallow end of Schoology, if you will, just using it for your own organizational purposes can be terrific. Just getting things organized in folders and files so it's there. Because remember, you can reuse this every year, so everything will be in Schoology. Next year you can add on to that.