This past week had some ups and downs with technology. Schoology servers experienced a few issues as many schools around the world are starting to return to school. If you are having issues with Schoology, please feel free to check the status page (link below) to see if Schoology is experiencing any issues. Moving forward, I would like to focus on instructional design and integration. Contact me to schedule a meeting and let's chat about what tools may work best in your classroom to help you digitize your course. 

Andrew Nation, M.Ed.
Instructional Technology Specialist

Did you know that students can record audio and video directly within Schoology? This feature got an upgrade this past Spring and appears to be working pretty well. This could be a fun way to do video submissions without needing to use an external platform like FlipGrid. Check out this video from FCPS to see the student view of the recording process. 

Congratulations! You survived the first few days of School! Now that we are beginning to settle into the swing of things, it's time to start looking toward the next few weeks to design engaging lessons using the technology at your disposal. Tools that directly integrate with Schoology or do not require students to sign in will be your ideal tools for the classroom. Remember that you cannot create accounts for students under the age of 13.

Also, a few things to keep in mind:

• All help requests must be submitted via SchoolDude. No exceptions. There is so much email coming in at the moment that the chances of your request getting lost in the sea of emails are very high. This is especially true if you send in a request outside of normal school hours. That email will be lost when everything picks up during school.
• The IT office is not very big. Please do not send everyone in your class who is having a problem at the same time. We had 7 people show up at once yesterday, and we are not able to accommodate that. Additionally, there is no guarantee that we will be in the office during classes, because we are also trying to cover SchoolDude tickets too.
• If you need something, I would not recommend responding to a whole school email whether you are a reply all person or a reply to sender person. Even if you are only replying to the sender, it is very easy to lose emails in the mix of everything and be unable to find it again when it is in a whole school email thread. 

Andrew Nation, M.Ed.
Instructional Technology Specialist

 As you enter a digital world for your classroom, please be sure that you are following copyright laws when designing your class. The fair use policy is not a free pass for educators to violate copyright law. Links and embedded content is allowed as long as attributions are given and the material is not modified from its original form.