Using Schoology to Help Facilitate Learning in a Personalized Learning Environment

Schoology has been a fantastic tool to use as a teacher and instructional technology coach. Over the past several years, this learning management system has helped me facilitate learning in a digital environment in ways that would have been difficult without this particular tool. As a 6th grade teacher, I experimented with personalized learning. I wanted my kids in my classroom to take ownership of their own learning. I wanted my kids to learn how to identify their learning needs and make decisions based on those needs. My end goal with implementing this personalized learning structure was for my students to be engaged, feel empowered, and truly learn how to learn.

In a personalized learning environment, teacher facilitation skills and abilities are of the uttermost importance for ensuring learners receive the feedback and assistance they need in order to continue their learning. Schoology provides a one stop shop for the management of digital learning, which is something I highly recommended when implementing this kind of learning structure. One of the examples of  how I used Schoology to help with my facilitation needs is posted below:

I created visuals on our classrooms walls for quick reminders for students. Next, I set up folders within my 6th grade ELA Schoology course for every grammar and punctuation skill that was a part of our classroom Personalized Learning Skill Work structure. The skills that I identified, that were based on the foundational and grade level language skills embedded in the Iowa Core, were the following set of skills:

Inside of each folder, I added learning resources that my students used throughout their learning process for each set of skills. Students were able to choose their skill of choice to learn about as they moved through the different rounds of this learning pathway. Students had to go throughthe learning process for all of the defined skills I gave them, then were encouraged to seek out OTHER skills they were interested inlearning more about.

Students (learners) had the opportunity to locate and use other resources, other than the ones I provided, that met their learning needs for each skill. They knew that their goal was to learn, practice, and apply the grammar and punctuation skills until they were able to truly understand the concepts. They had to show their learning in the form of a summative assessment once they had gone through the formative learning process for each skill set.

One of the  best things about this whole set-up was the fact that I constantly reminded my students about the BIGGER IMMEDIATE PURPOSE of them acquiring these particualr language skills. My students were starting a PBLwriting project about three-fourths of the way through their personalized skill work learning process. They were going to need to have as much background and knowledge of language skills in order to write their own children's book! (I will write about this project in another post later!)

(This was AWESOME to see how these kids applied thier language skill learning when they created their collaborative children's book!!!)

As the facilitator, I was able to view the analytics during my plan time and after school to help keep track of who was using particular resources and who I needed to talk to the next day about their lack of resource usage that I saw on my end.

In the ANALYTICS section of Schoology, I could look at data for how many times a particular resource was accessed by students. This data gave me the total number of clicks. I knew how many students were focusing on each chosen set of skills at any given time, so I was able to see if the resource was being used at an appropriate level by my students. If it was not, this was something that I was able to ask my students about. I found out that there were a couple of resources that they did not find useful for their learning. This was awesome feedback for me as the facilitator.

The other piece of data that was super useful to me was the user data in the analytics section on Schoology. I scanned this section of the analytics as often as I could, especially when I was tracking assignments and late assignments in my grade book. I was able to quickly see if particular students submitted assignments or not.

I was also able to see how many times an individual submitted a particular assignment. If there were 2 or more action counts for a particular assignment, I could see when the most updated assignment was submitted. This also helped me keep track of the students that were possibly struggling with the skills that they were trying to learn. I found that several of my students who struggled with learning various skills often submitted assignments more than once. If I could go back and do this again, I would definitely use this data more than I did to drive more conversation with each one of my students! 

The last part of their PLS journey was to reflect on their learning. I created reflection assignments for each round of the PLS process. I LOVED this part of the entire personalized learning structure! I was able to read each student's reflection, gain a good understanding of what they learned, and comment/provide feedback to them all in one space.

Now, looking back at this experience four years later, I am able to access this entire digital learning experience and use it to share with others and gain more ideas for how I can continue to improve learning environments for our students here in Red Oak! The number one thing I would recommend doing differently than I did would be to plan more one on one conferences with students based on the analytics you receive on the facilitator end on Schoology. The things you find out from students are usually things that you would have never known if you didn't ask them data driven questions.