Navigate 3.1.2 Creation and Investigation into Courses

Going into this quest I was super excited to try my hand at creating a course shell in a LMS.  I chose  schoology because I've heard so much great buzz about it recently and quickly got to work.  As with the Recorded Session Quest, the hardest and most time consuming component of creating a course shell within schoology was setting up and authorizing my account.

Once logged in, I was impressed at the ease of putting the course together!  Last summer I built a course website from scratch using Google Sites and now feel like I spent a lot of wasted time when there is a resource like schoology on the Web 2.0.  It is streamlined, super easy, and has some really awesome tools!

Upon setting up my course shell, I added a discussion forum as a place for students to ask questions about the course and assignments.  I also tried my hand at posting an upcoming event, an assignment, a folder for additional resources, and an update.  Without any real students, I did not get a chance to test run the gradebook or attendance tools, but a quick glance proved that they are just as streamlined and easy to use as the others.

The last step in creating my course shell in schoology was to upload/import the Introduction to Digital Citizenship content from GAVS.  Just like I would from a Learning Object Repository (LOR), the process of importing content might have been the easiest step of all.  As part of the Add Materials feature is the option to Add File/Link/External Tool.  With one click and the copy/paste of an url, the fully functioning content was immediately available to my students.