Schoology – a learning platform with great options

A possible alternative to the NING!

I started using Nings in my classroom last year and fell in love with the possibilities.  I have been searching for an alternative since receiving the following message from them

We want to provide a new level of innovation to Network Creators — and build all the valuable features Network Creators have asked us to. To get there, we need to focus 100% on paid Ning Networks. This phasing out of free services won’t happen until July, so you’ll have plenty of time to weigh your options. We’ll do our best to provide you with a migration path if you don’t wish to continue with Ning, but we’d love to have you come along for all of the exciting future developments.

I recently discovered Schoology and I am investigating it as a free alternative to Nings.  Schoology is a free web-based learning management system that uses social networking features.

Academic Features

1. Instructors can use course profiles to manage a class blog, upload assignments, communicate with students, and create discussion boards.
2. Assignments can be quickly created from the homepage and will automatically generate an assignment profile.
3. Instructors can create custom tests/quizzes which students can take online.
4. The gradebook is automatically populated when an assignment is created and can be configured for custom grading scales and weights.
5. Students can upload files directly to their instructors through the assignment dropbox. Instructors can then grade these submissions and hand back graded assignments through a dropback feature.
6. Each course has an analytics package that allows instructors/administrators to track student activity. The analytics package provides statistics that can be broken down by course, assignment, discussion, and/or user.

Social Features

1. School administrators can configure their school’s internal network and choose to open their network to connect with users at other schools. Users can send private messages to anyone in their network
2. Group profiles are a flexible way to manage and organize users within a school. Each group has a blog, group events, discussion boards, and document sharing. Groups can be used to manage departments, extra-curricular, sports teams, and much more.
3. Each user has an individualized profile and blog which they can configure. Users can choose to subscribe to other user blogs to receive recent posts right on their homepage.
4. Each user has a private documents area where they can upload and manage personal documents

Management Features

1. Administrators can manage school-wide events using the school calendar. Instructors can manage events for their courses or groups. Personal calendars aggregate school, course, and group events
2. Each user can choose to receive email or SMS text notifications for personal, course, or group related updates.
3. Each user can adjust privacy settings for their profile and account. School administrators can configure school privacy settings to control publishing limits for all users in a school.

Administrative Features

1. School administrators can configure usernames for their school as an alternative to using the default email login.
2. Schools can have Single Sign-On integration.
3. Courses, users, and grades can be imported or exported in/out of the system using .xls or .csv files.
4. Customize your school login page.
5. School administrators can create parent/guardian accounts that can be used to view their child’s academic content and grades.
6. Schoology’s API will allow schools and individuals to create custom plugins and features for Schoology.