Instruction Manual
Introduction You can login to Schoology using an email address or username. Email Login To login to Schoology using your email address go to schoology.com and Click the "Log In" button at the top right corner of the page. You can also go to https://www.schoology.com/login and enter your username and password.
Username Login To login to Schoology using your username you can click the "Log In" button at the top right of the page, and select "Login with your Username." You can also go to https://www.schoology.com/login/username and enter your username and password.
Forgot Password If you have forgotten the password to login to your account, you can visit https://www.schoology.com/login/forgot. Enter your email address and then press "Retrieve Password." A one-‐time link will be sent to your email address which will allow you to login and reset your password. Forgot Username If you have forgotten the email address associated with your Schoology account, you can ask your teacher, school administrator, or send an email to
[email protected].
Homepage You can use your homepage to view recent activity. Recent activity is a stream of information that includes any item that involves you or your connections. Below are the kinds of information that appear in your feed. Academic Information • •
Social Information
Course updates and announcements Aggregated sentences when new content is posted (e.g. 3 assignments, 2 topics, and 1 event were posted for English 101)
• •
Teasers for blog posts that you or your subscribers post. Group updates
Updates What is an Update? An update is a 400 character post that can be made for your any profile (e.g. user, course, group, school). Updates are simple ways to create quick posts to a profile that other users in a network (e.g. personal, course, group, school) can see on their homepages. Updates can include files, links, and embedded videos. How Do I Create an Update? At the top of the homepage is what we call a "Smart Box." If you are a teacher, the Smart Box contains tools to make personal content (e.g. Update) as well as academic content (e.g. Assignment, Event, Course Update/Announcement). To begin creating, simply choose the type of content you would like to create, and follow the visual direction. Please note, the "Update" tab will create an update for your personal profile, while the "Course Update" tab will create an update on your course's profile. Upcoming Feed The Upcoming Feed acts as a simplified planner, displaying events and assignments by date. Days will only be displayed when there is a corresponding event or an assignment. (Screenshot on next page)
Search The search bar is located on the top navigation toolbar. You can use this search area to quickly navigate to user profiles, courses, assignments, and groups. As you type, the search results filter through your network/school, courses, assignments, and groups. You also have the option to search all of Schoology for public users, courses, groups, and schools.
Courses Each course created in Schoology must have a parent course (e.g. AP Biology) and section (Section 1). A parent course does not have a profile, but is used to organize multiple class sections together. Course sections each have their own profile, enrollments, and content.
Create a Course/Section To create a new course, click on "Courses" in the left navigation menu, and then click "Create Course."
Step 1: Create Course -‐ Fill out the required information. The course code and section codes are used to sync up your classes with your student information system or other software.
Step 2: Section Details -‐ These fields are all optional.
Step 3: Customize Settings -‐ You can control who can view your course profile and its content using 'Course Visibility Settings' You can also control which users can post on your course's recent activity using the 'Other Settings.' To better understand the effect different settings have on a viewers experience, see the course privacy area.
You will then be brought into the enroll section of your course editor, where you will find a listing of all the users in your network or school.
To enroll students, click on their names to highlight the cell. As you select users, the 'Select (#)' area will tell you how many users have been selected. Once you have selected users to enroll, click the 'Enroll Users' button.
After you have successfully enrolled your students, click on the 'Back to Course Name' link to view the course profile.
Profile Each course profile has its own left menu specific to each course. You can use the left menu to access the different areas of a course profile. As the admin of a course, you will see tools for Send Message, Edit Course, Analytics, Attendance, and Gradebook. Students will only see Recent Activity and the course content areas (Topics, Assignments, Documents, and Discussions will show up once you begin creating them).
As you create content for your course and add updates, your profile will begin to fill out. When you create content (topics, assignments, documents, discussions, etc), an update will be posted in your recent activity to let your students know when things are being posted.
When you create updates for your course, you can select the checkbox to 'Display as course status', which will temporarily show the update at the top of the course profile. This can be removed at any point, and the original post will remain in the recent activity.
Add Course Content Use the 'Add Content' button in the left menu to create course content.
Topics Topics are the most advanced of all types of content. A topic allows you to create structured content, where you fully customize the content through a rich-‐text editor. You can even embed images, media, Schoology content, and control the html. Step 1: Give your topic a title.
Step 2: Edit the content of your topic. You can use the WYSIWYG editor to customize colors, fonts, alignments. There are also tools that allow you to embed images and media. You can use the 'Create/Insert Course Content' button to add other Schoology content into your topic.
Assignments Each assignment has its own profile. Whenever an assignment is created it will automatically populate into the gradebook. Name is the only required field. Selecting a category allows you control weighting in the Grade Setup area. If you do not have any categories you can create one in this form. You can also set due dates and create a description for the assignment.
Grading options: You can open up grading options to set Max pts, Grading Scale, Grading Period and Factor. There is also a 'Set as midterm/final' which will allow you to weight this assignment against an entire grading period.
Advanced options: You can used advanced options to turn on/off the assignment Dropbox, Comments wall, and Assessment (Test/Quiz). Publishing/unpublishing your assignment will control whether or not the student can see the assignment. The grade statistics option allows you to choose which grade statistics (if any) are shown to students for this particular assignment.
Discussion Creating a discussion will generate a threaded discussion for students and teachers to contribute to. Discussions can be shared with any other course at your school or even at other schools.
Gradebook The gradebook feature allows you to easily manage your students' grades online. Assignments are automatically populated into the gradebook upon creation. You can organize assignments into customizable categories that can be weighted. Each assignment within a category can be weighted individually. The "Grade Setup" button is located at the top of the gradebook.
You can toggle your mouse to the 'Comment' feature, which will allow you to comment on a student's assignment grade by clicking on a cell.
Grade Setup Grading Scales -‐ Create custom grading scales to grade your assignments. Grading scales map an alphanumeric value of your choice to a percentage grade (i.e. 0-‐100). To add a new scale, simply click the "add" button opposite of "Grading Scales."
Enter a "Scale Name" to define this new grading scale For instance, if you wanted a Pass/Fail system, you could name the scale as "Pass/Fail." Then you would set the Letter Grade, which is an alphanumeric value and a cutoff value. For ease of use, you may use the slider to adjust the cutoff value.
The Cutoff Value is the point at which a grade is considered to be the equivalent letter grade. Keeping consistent with our "Pass/Fail" example, you could set the "Letter Grade" to "P" and a Cutoff Value of "100." Then we would click "Add Level" to define the "Fail" option. Once the appropriate values are defined, click "Save Changes." You can now apply this grading scale to any assignment you create in this course.
Categories -‐ Categories define the various types of assignments that you have. For instance, you may want a "Test" category, or a "Quiz" category. There is no limit to the number of categories you can create, and each can be weighted according to your own definitions. To create a new category, click "add" in the categories box. You can then define a name and determine how it is calculated (total points or percent). As an option, you can define a "Drop Lowest" number. This will automatically drop the given number of lowest graded assignments for a given user.
Default settings can be defined. These fields are not required, but make it easier for you when creating new assignments. Instead of having to assign individual values for each component, whenever you create an assignment for a given category, the default values will be applied. Final Grade Settings -‐ The Final Grade Settings allow you to define settings for computing final grades. By default, the final grades are computed using a "Numeric" scale; however, you have the ability to use any of the custom scales that you defined. This allows you to apply letter grades to numeric values in any manner you define. You can also define whether "Categories" are weighted or "Not weighted." Weighted categories allow you to set different weights for each category.
Attendance The attendance tool allows you to quickly mark students late, absent, excused or present. Simply select a cursor to begin marking students absent, late or excused. By default, students are marked present to reduce the amount of clicking required during the attendance process.
You can toggle your mouse to the Comment feature, which will allow you to leave a comment about a student by clicking on a cell.
Administrators have access to a master attendance tool. This tool lets administrators mark students late, absent or excused for the entire day or for certain class periods. The attendance feature is valuable because it aggregates and maintains important individual student and class attendance data.
Social Tools Profile Your profile can be used as a public or private way to share information about yourself. You can customize your profile picture and fill out information about yourself that you would like others to see. Recent Activity This is the default view of your profile. You can use this area to create short, timely updates about yourself for other people in your network to see. Any update that you create will automatically show up on the Recent Activity area of the homepage when users in your network first login. Updates can be a maximum of 400 characters.
Blog From the Blog area in your course profile, you can create your own custom blog. Blog posts can be created using the WYSIWYG editor, allowing you to customize the look and feel of each blog post, including embedding images, media, and editing html.
Other users can choose to subscribe to your blog. Subscribing to a blog will add any new blog post made by this user show up in your blogs area, similar to an RSS reader.
Inbox This are allows you to send message to users in your network or school. You can also recieve messages, depending on your privacy settings, from users at your school or at other schools.
You can message multiple users at once through threaded messaging. Simply begin typing the name of a recipient and our smart text-‐field will filter all the users in your network, displaying a thumbnail listing which you can click on. To add multiple users, simply repeat the previous step.
Groups You can create groups for social or academic purposes. Each group has a profile with areas for Recent Activity, Discussions, Documents, and a calendar with group events. Groups have some of the same features that courses do.
Creating a Group Go to 'Groups' in the left menu then click on the 'Create a new group' button.
Step 1: Enter Group Info -‐ Fill out the group information. Under 'Invite Type', you can select how people join your group. Invite only means only course admins can invite users to join the group. Allow Requests means users can request to join the group. Open groups can be joined by anyone.
Step 2: Customize Your Group -‐ Control who can see the different parts of your group profile.
Step 3: Invite -‐ Invite users in your network or school to join the group. Click on their names to highlight the cell. As you select users, the 'Select (#)' area will tell you how many users have been selected. Once you have selected users to invite, click the 'Enroll Users' button. Step 3: Invite -‐ Invite users in your network or school to join the group. Click on their names to highlight the cell. As you select users, the 'Select (#)' area will tell you how many users have been selected. Once you have selected users to invite, click the 'Enroll Users' button.
Network From the Network page you can view and search for users in your network. By default, you are automatically connected with people in your school. To add a member outside of your school, you can visit the desired user's profile and click the link titled "Add to my network."
Settings Privacy You can access your privacy settings by clicking "Settings" on the top navigation bar. Your privacy settings allow you to choose which elements of your account can be viewed by other users. The privacy settings are classified by four categories: Search, Profile, Your Blog, and Messaging. You can follow the on-‐screen details located to the right of the drop-‐down menu. By default there are five privacy levels. From most specific to least specific they are: Nobody, Connections, School, Schoology Users, and Everyone. Nobody -‐ This means that nobody other than yourself has access to this information. Connections -‐ This means that users in your network have access to this information. School -‐ This means that any users in your school network (including parents) have access to this information. Schoology Users -‐ This means that any registered Schoology user (regardless of network) has access to this information. Everyone -‐ This means that anyone (including unregistered users) has access to this information.
To access your privacy settings go to https://www.schoology.com/settings.
Notification You can access your Notification settings by clicking "Account" on the top navigation bar. Use this area to select which notifications you would like to receive. When a notification is checked, you will receive an email notifications whenever there is a change or an update to the corresponding item. For example, when an instructor posts an assignment, hands back a graded item, or makes a class announcement you will receive a notification.
Password You can change your password by clicking "Settings" on the top navigation bar and then clicking the tab labeled "Password". If your school uses Single-‐Sign-‐On (SSO) or has disabled this feature, you will not be able to change your password using this area.
