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Schoology: Social Media Meets the Classroom

February 23, 2011 4:51 pm John Sowash 0 comments

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John Sowash

This week I had the privledge to visit the fine folks of Illinos at the Illinois Computing Educators (ICE) conference. I led a session on the Collaborative STEM Classroom, attended a few workshops and hung out in the PLN Cafe with a bunch of fine folks.

I also had a chance to browse through the vendor exhibit hall to see the latest gadgets, gizmos, and geekdom related to EdTech. To be honest, I wasn’t too impressed, with one exception. There were a lot of Interactive Whiteboard vendors, classic publishers (would you believe that Worldbook is back on the market!), and various solutions for various problems. Nothing really caught my eye until I came to the Schoology booth.

Schoology is a Learning Management System (LMS) that looks and feels like Facebook. No, seriously, if you don’t look carefully you might think you’re logged in to Facebook. So why not just use Facebook? How is this different from Edmodo? Great questions.

Schoology incorporates the necessities of a learning management system (gradebook, attendance, assessment) with the best of social media (discussion threads, customizable profiles, resource sharing). The result is a unique mix of social interaction and content delivery.

Schoology is in its infancy. It’s currently a venture capitol supported company that has a lot of room for growth. When I spoke with the reps at the conference they indicated that they are working on creating a course ecosystem that would allow companies or individuals to create courses and share or sell them with other educators. I would also like to Schoology integrate with existing content providers such as Florida Virtual, Aventa, and K12. Using their content with the Schoology interface will create a powerful learning solution. Keep your eye on Schoology.

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