A Schoology Surprise

Originally written last July ~

Our amazing technology director and I provided Web 2.0 training at our school yesterday and it was a great experience!  The teachers were supportive, intuitive, and overall glad to be there.  I was worried about having a wide enough array of sites to make everyone feel like they took something away from the training, but everything worked out just fine.  The morning session had a wider span of people in it than the afternoon group, but I believe everyone walked away with something they will be able to use this school year.  When both sessions were finished, people stayed to look around the sites more, ask questions, brainstorm on additional uses, and collaborate with each other.  This was an encouraging site to see; I was glad we had sparked enough interest that they didn't all take off running out the door as soon as we were finished!

One of the most educational things that happened all day was by accident.  Last spring, a first year, 6th grade, history and language arts teacher who I mentored showed me Edmodo.  At the beginning of the summer I thought I would use this site next year in my class...but that was before I discovered Schoology.  I wanted to show him Schoology and bounce a few ideas off of him.  The discussion between 3 middle grades teachers (him , a new-to-our-district JH science teacher, and me) turned into a discussion larger than I ever imagined.  Three high school english teachers were still in the room and they LOVED the idea of using Schoology!  They were so excited about it and asked great questions.  We brainstormed ways to use this site for a half an hour.  People were saying things like, "when you do your Romeo and Juliet unit, you could have the students post blogs as one of the characters."  They were asking about posting SMART Notebook presentations on the site, building collaboration between some of the upper and lower grades in the room, and discussing ways to keep parents informed through Schoology. 

I stayed at school to do a little work in my classroom, but by the time I got home last night two of them had already set up Schoology accounts, got the courses entered, and were letting me know all about it!  The teacher I had originally began the discussion with and I created a "fake student" so we could see what it was like from a student's point-of-view.  It was so easy to join his 6th grade class and my 8th grade class. The links loaded quickly and it was easy to get around the site.  We decided that the students are going to love Schoology; we can't wait to share it with them and everyone else we know!