Syncing Your Schoology Gradebook To Your Skyward Gradebook

In this post, I'll be explaining how to sync your Schoology and Skyward gradebooks at the beginning of a new course:

1. Choose the grading categories that you plan on using from Skyward.
2. Next, log into Schoology and navigate to your Schoology course.
3. Click on the Skyward app on the lower left side of your course and click Configuration.
4. If you don’t already see a dropdown box under the Schoology Course Categories header, press + Include Category for the categories you want to map from Skyward to Schoology.
1. Select (Create New Schoology Category) if your Skyward categories do not yet exist in Schoology.
2. Choose the corresponding category from the dropdown if it already exists.
3. If you have chosen to weight your categories in Skyward, you will be able  to view and set the weights of each category. (Note, this must be ok’d by building principals before weighting grading categories.)

We've gone Enterprise! Schoology enterprise that is.

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Great news everyone, we've decided to purchase the Schoology enterprise version this year for the secondary buildings. This is going to change the way those of you who used the free version in the past have done things, and I feel that it might interest many of you who haven't tried it in the past.

1. You no longer have to build your courses from scratch, We've linked Skyward and Schoology which means that all of the courses and sections that are built into Skyward are automatically pulled into Schoology.
2. Along those lines, you no longer have to have students join your classes by giving them the code. Because of the Skyward link, all teachers and students are already rostered to the class.
3. You only have to enter grades one time. Schoology will now become your "go to" gradebook. Any assignments that you build in Schoology will automatically be created in your Skyward gradebook, no more grading in Schoology and then turning around and entering them in Skyward.
4. You, and students, have the ability to record audio right in the assignment, discussion, or quiz/tests.

There are too many more things to list in one blog post, so I'll be sharing other tips and tricks as time goes on. If you're concerned that you don't know how this Schoology thing works, don't worry, we'll be having training sessions once school gets underway.

I'm looking forward to "...boldly going where no one has gone before" with all of you this year!

Google Classroom Users Can Now Assign Quizzes Through Quizizz

For anyone out there who has used Kahoot, you probably already know how much fun students have playing, I mean studying with it. I recently found a new tool that is similar in some ways to Kahoot, but offers some interesting differences - that program is called Quizizz.

Like Kahoot, Quizizz allows you to create multiple choice questions. Like Kahoo, Quizizz gives you a code that students type in to their device after going to a login screen (join.quizizz.com). And finally, like Kahoot, students gain points by answering questions correctly, and the faster they answer the questions, the more points they receive. The way that Quizizz differs from Kahoot is that students are not tied to the teacher's overhead to see the questions; students see the questions on their own devices.

Tip of the Week - May the 4th be with you!

Happy Star Wars day to everyone! Today's tip has to do more with general time savings rather than a specific tip for one of our commonly used programs. Most computer mice now a days have a scroll wheel, or some part that allows you to scroll up and down on the computer screen. I've been using mine for quite some time, but it wasn't until recently that I started using one of the functions of the scroll wheel - the double click.

Tip of the Week 4/25/16

Last week's Tip of the Week is a little late, I got all set to write it and then noticed that many of the images that I'd uploaded in previous posts had disappeared and spent the afternoon chasing down the missing images. Hopefully things will go more smoothly from now on.

I wanted talk about keyboard shortcuts this week. I've already told you about two timesaving shortcuts that I use on a daily basis, Ctrl+Tab (for moving between tabs) and Alt+Tab (for moving between open windows) you can see that post here.

Customizing Your Profile Photo for Your Google Account

Have you ever received an email from someone and saw either their picture, or a picture of something that represents them and think "How do I get MY picture to show up?" Today I'm going to show you just how easy it is to link your picture to your Google account.

Tip of the Week 4/15/16

I've decided that, in addition to blogging about educational technology in general, I'm going to start writing weekly tips for programs that we commonly use in our district, mostly centered around Illuminate, Skyward, and various Google programs that we have available to us. If you'd like to learn about something specific, feel free to send me requests and I'll add them to future Tip of the Week posts. 

Now, without further ado, here is this week's Tip of the Week...

Using the Tab Key to Quickly Enter Data