Category Archives: Schoology

Sharing Microsoft Teams Recordings in Schoology

Educators in Wood County Schools’ Distance Learning Academy (DLA) adapt their instruction to deliver lessons in ways that make use of several digital platforms. Although this video was created for educators in the DLA, it can be useful for any educator wanting to find additional ways to record (and protect) their instruction for students. Perhaps their students are at home with health issues. Or, perhaps one of their students learns better by viewing a lesson more than once on her or his own timeline.

In this video: Learn how to record your instruction using Microsoft Teams and then share the recording in your Schoology course.

Teams Integration with Schoology Ending in WCS

When it became necessary for Wood County Schools to switch to remote instruction last fall, teachers rose to the occasion and began learning multiple technology tools to meet with, and meet the needs of, their students. Any option that helped during that period of time was welcomed. One tool was the Teams integration within Schoology. It allowed for teachers to quickly and easily establish a face-to-face meeting with students without having to completely understand how the Teams app itself worked. Today, for most, this tool is no longer necessary. Teachers are still using Teams in all kinds of ways, but have since had the time to get familiar with how the Teams app works.

The West Virginia Department of Education has recently determined that there is a security issue with the Teams integration with Schoology. To address this, Wood County Schools will discontinue its use on November 5th.

What does this mean specifically?

  • If you create links to Teams meetings in Schoology only, this option will no longer work after November 5th.
  • If you create links to meetings (either a one time meeting or ongoing) using the Teams app, your links will continue to work.
  • Any Teams meeting links created in the Teams app can be copied and pasted into a Schoology course or group.

We wanted you to be aware of the changes so that if you are still using this method, you have time to transition to the Teams app. If you have concerns or need some help, please feel free to book an appointment with Eric Murphy or Jimmy Stewart. We are happy to help!

Planned Schoology Maintenance

A message from PowerSchool (parent company of Schoology):

Maintenance Window: Saturday, October 9, 2021, 4:00 am – 6:00 am PDT

This is a notice for an upcoming maintenance that is being conducted on the SaaS platform. There is downtime expected for this maintenance. Please see below details.

Products Impacted: Schoology

Reason for Maintenance: We are performing infrastructure maintenance and upgrades on our servers for the PowerSchool Schoology product.

Everything Schoology!

Amber Matty, Curriculum Software/LMS Technology Coordinator, has published a course on Schoology titled Everything Schoology.The course explains topics such as creating and managing course materials, how-to tutorials, GIF animations, creating and getting the most out of assessments, using the grade book, and so much more.

This is an excellent go-to resource for educators in Wood County Schools for getting the most out of Schoology.

Request the course access code below!

To add the course, follow these steps.

  • Log in to Schoology.
  • Select Courses in the top menu.
  • Click My Courses.
  • From the My Courses page, click Join Course on the right side of the page.
  • Enter your access code (XXXX-XXXX-XXXXX). 
  • Click Join.

Give us your name & e-mail and we will send you the access code.

🙈🙊🙉

The opportunities for discussion, collaboration, engagement, and sharing among students, their class as a whole, and their teacher using the Schoology platform are extensive and exciting! The ability for a teacher to post an idea and engage in discussion, whether in the classroom or out, using the platform provides opportunities for students to share and engage in ways that are more inclusive and dynamic. This changes the way we teach in subtle ways that are difficult to define easily and communicate clearly.

Our classrooms used to be defined, in part, by one room with four walls. Technology is changing that as we have all witnessed in the past year. In years past, if a parent wanted to visit your classroom, an appointment was setup. Today, parents can meet virtually and also be present for much of what their child is doing on the Schoology platform. This increases a parent’s involvement in what is going on in the classroom.

We know that when parents are more engaged in their child’s learning, the child becomes more engaged. We also know that when children are more engaged, learning increases.

With this increased engagement, we have to make certain that platforms used in Wood County Schools are safe places for our students and our staff.

Recently, a word filter was enabled on Schoology. The platform allows for one word filter list across the entire district. This means that one list must apply evenly from pre-k to seniors in high school. The aim of the filter is to reduce exposure to language that is developmentally inappropriate for various age groups. The aim is not to be punitive nor restrictive of speech.

The filter was adapted from a similar list used by YouTube in its comments section of its videos. It filters for language that is deemed racist, vulgar, anti-Semitic, and more.

As educators, we have an obligation to protect our students from language that is not appropriate for their age group. However, this can get tricky at the high school level.

Within the platform, the filter applies to areas such as updates, blog posts, discussion comments, and more. Should a student use a word deemed not acceptable across the platform, for example, in a class discussion, his or her language will be replaced with the word ‘whoops!’.

The filter does not apply to other platforms used within Schoology. For instance, the filter will not affect a student submitting an assignment using Microsoft Word.

One way to think about it is that speech that is used in a public arena (i.e., discussion posts and comments) will be subject to the filter. Speech that is more private in nature (i.e., an essay submitted by a student in Word format) will not be subject to the filter.

This strikes a balance and allows educators to be the final arbiter of what language is most appropriately used in their classrooms by students, whether that be a physical classroom or online, particularly at the secondary level.

It should be emphasized that the aim of the filter is not punitive in nature. In fact, it provides opportunities for those teachable moments. When a student’s language is replaced with ‘whoops!,’ it gives the student the chance to edit her or his content and then choose different language or to initiate a discussion with the teacher about why the language needed to be amended. Also, to reiterate, essays, book reports, poetry, or any other assignment completed in, for example, Microsoft Word or PowerPoint, are not subject to the filter.

Our goal is to work towards fostering a safe and inclusive space for our students while safeguarding them from age-inappropriate content across the Schoology platform. It is also to encourage and inspire our students to use their voices and share their content while learning to balance their understanding of the freedom of speech and the appropriate use of language in a K-12 educational setting.

Schoology Issues Explanation for Last Week’s Disruption in Service

Hello PowerSchool Customer,

We understand that trust begins with transparency. With that in mind, we would like to provide a deeper insight into the service disruptions on the Schoology Learning platform you may have experienced this past week. 

Summary 

During the week of 4/19/2021, Schoology Learning customers experienced service disruptions. The Schoology engineering team analyzed the issues that caused disruptions and implemented corrective changes to address the problems observed. As a result of these actions, the application is now fully functional, and all services have been operating at optimum levels. 

Root Cause 

During the week, we encountered transient network connectivity issues between our connection proxy servers and our databases. These issues triggered an aggressive recovery process to recreate database connections en-masse. These new database connections caused additional network traffic, which again triggered the same recovery process. This cascading recovery loop prevented our web servers from properly serving incoming requests, which in turn led to service disruptions experienced by our customers. 

Our analysis indicates that such network connectivity issues very likely occurred over the last 12 months also. However, our resiliency thresholds (i.e., ability to handle errors per second) were adequate to limit any impact from these connectivity issues. The incidents experienced during the week of 4/19 exceeded these thresholds, leading to the cascading error recovery loop condition described above. 

Remediation 

We worked closely with Amazon Web Service (AWS) technical experts and tuned several configuration parameters to handle these network connectivity issues and recover performance gracefully without any disruption. These settings have been tested internally and deployed to our production systems. Our monitoring systems indicate that these parameters have significantly increased the resiliency of Schoology Learning against the type of network issues observed last week.  

Our Commitment to You:  

Over the last year, we have added and invested significantly more development and cloud resources to support the tremendous 700% increase in Schoology usage after districts switched to remote learning during the pandemic. Since then, we have provided uninterrupted Schoology service to millions of students, and we want you to remain confident that we will continue to be a critical partner to your district learning experience.   

At PowerSchool, we pride ourselves on the ability to serve customers with high availability and the dependability you have come to trust. We want to assure you that the improvements PowerSchool has made and will continue to make are intended to deliver fully functioning application platforms to serve our customers.   

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you and your teachers, students, and staff. Our goal is to always provide top-level value and service with the utmost level of customer support.

Thank you,
Your PowerSchool Team 

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

As we begin to start thinking about the end of the school year, and what a year it has been, know that all your hard work getting your courses organized in Schoology will not go away. In fact, copying your courses to your resources will not only allow you to keep your courses intact, it will also enable you to make changes to any courses that you would like to make for the 2021-2022 academic year. This is not something you need to do right now. In fact, to make sure you have everything up until the end of your course, it’s best to wait until the last few days of school. We will have more information and directions on saving your courses to resources in the coming weeks.

And, what if you forget to do this?

No worries at all. All courses are automatically archived and can be retrieved at a future date. We will post directions on Innovate so you can save your courses into your resources anytime from the end of this school year up until the next. Now, after tweaking your courses for any changes you would like to make, you are all set for next school year.