Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Schoology vs. Google Drive #smackdown

I love Google. I love Google Drive. I love the fact everything is free. I love the collaboration. I love having students use Drive.

We are a GAFE school so our kids do use it, but we also have the LMS Schoology. It took some time for me to warn up to it, but I have realized is awesomeness as well.

I'll do this smack down style.

What I Love: Drive is awesome for collaboration. I have students share with me when they start a document or presentation. I can chat, comment or edit while they are writing, not after. Feedback is awesome. It's like we are creating the essay/project together.
Schoology allows me to keep everything in one place. It's very organized. I love that I can create rubrics and the students see them right away. I love that I can align the rubrics to CCSS.

What I Don't Love: Drive is really hard to keep organized. I have to use the search feature all the time. I make folders, but things get lost in the folders. OK not lost, misplaced. Grading is a pain. Rubrics have to be shared and it's hard to include them in the assignment.
Schoology is an LMS. So that means that student's work is not accessible to them after the course is over. Schoology has had some blips with syncing with Drive. It hasn't always worked the best. There are so many options with assignments that it gets confusing sometimes. Visible, published, available, ungraded, sometimes I'm not sure what to do with all of the options

Solution: Use both. Schoology allows students and teachers to connect their Drive account to Schoology. Students can create something in Drive and upload it to Schoology. Best of both worlds!

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

I'm sorry #ohedchat

I want to be honest with my #ohedchat community. I have failed you recently. We started this crazy thing a little over a year ago. I'm an amazed with the progress we have made. But I have made some mistakes.

Mistake 1. Selfishness - in my ambition to make this thing happen, I have selfishly thought that I could do it all. Make the surveys, moderate the chats, make schedules, and I couldn't.

Mistake 2. I refused help - somewhere along the line, multiple people probably offered to help me along the way and for some reason I said "Nope, I got it." I'm not sure why but again I thought I could do it all.

Mistake 3. I procrastinated - I waited to post the topic until late or asked a moderator to cover at the last minute.

Bottom line is that I don't want the chat to suffer because of my mistakes. We need to keep this going and continue the positive conversation. This started out as a grassroots movement and it needs to stay that way.

If you are interested in setting up a moderator rotation or helping out any other way, please let me know. Also let me know if you have any other suggestions to keep this thing going. I didn't start this community, and I don't want my mistakes to end it. Thanks.