Schoology NEXT 2018 Day Three

Day three of Schoology NEXT San Diego began with a higher education breakfast, a small gathering of three tables of fourteen other Schoology attendees along with the four of us from the college. While higher education had an active session in Chicago in 2017, that was also driven by those who chose to present. At the session a participant noted the usefulness of QualityMatters.org in the design and deployment of effective online courses. She noted that their programs are not online programs, only that some courses in the program are extended online. QualityMatters guidelines and matrices help with the design of the courses.

Technology for Teachers is a PDF book that supports teacher education in technology.

In an evening conversation the other night I was made aware of a book used in the Northwest Territories about growing up indigenous in that region, Raising Ourselves. The book is available in paperback and hardcover, but not on Kindle. The book looks like it might be of interest in a reading class.


Adam Larson Director of Academic Solutions and Educational Strategy, opens the keynote for Wednesday morning. A humorous warming up speech leading into the awards ceremony. Awards for ambassador, teacher, administrator, and K-12 district of the year.



Ivan Casanova executive vice president marketing spoke second introducing the second keynote.


Stephen Rao @sterao8
Speaking on digital citizenship unit in use in New Jersey targeting third, fourth, and fifth grade.  If digital devices are being used in your classroom, it is your responsibility to educate the students in how to use that technology. Rings of responsibility. Private and personal information. Search: keys to keywords. Whose is it, anyway? Copyright rules. power of words. Cyberbullying. A serious conversation. Common sense education.  He uses Pear Deck, Breakout EDU, Digital Passport. Digital citizenship badge. A physical badge that went onto their laptop. All embedded in Schoology, all available. If you make something, share it. Everything should be open source all the time. Let us take care of digital citizenship. What's great, what's not about the Internet, making kids safe all the time.

Taking it up a notch: Exploring Enhanced Question Types

Lori Collier
Senior Professional Development Specialist, Schoology
The session starts with the participants taking an assessment to try out some of the new assessment types.


Setting up assessments does have the new password option. This permits one to set passwords section by section (the above screen is local to a section).



Drag and drop is one of the new assessment types available.

Another new type is the highlight the correct text by clicking on the correct word choice.

The questions that use the ruler - the ruler is inches. Is the ruler available in the metric system? Question answered: yes, this is controlled from the Set Up tab.



Tests/quizzes will eventually phase out and unconverted tests/quizzes will be disabled. Conversion is necessary.



11:30 How Schoology Uses Schoology to Build Schoology
Brian Blount, Chief Architect, Schoology; Sam Marx, Director of Product Operations, Schoology

The operations team is responsible for the care and feeding of the website, automation and tools teams is part of operations as well. Brian is in engineering making sure Schoology uses the right tools, robust tools. This is the first presentation by engineering in a couple years.



Schoology uses Schoology all the way down in all areas. Onboarding new employees is done by a course built inside Schoology. The tools of the classroom are used to orient new employees. The course covers Schoology, history, background, philosophy, goals, organization charts.

Some of the teams at Schoology also use Schoology to onboard employees into a unit such as the support personnel.  Internal training for developers is also in Schoology. Envy is the local development platform that the engineers use on a daily basis to build schoology.

Schoology Public API. The Public API specifies what operations other programs can do. Private APIs are restricted usually within one company. Public are those that are exposed externally to partners, customers. Private is easy to modify, the company controls both ends. Public APIs are more locked in.

Schoology also uses their own public API, they eat their own dogfood. Their mobile app uses their own public API. The mobile app was designed from the get go to use the public API. This avoids maintaining two sets of APIs - public and private. This also ensures that the public API is driven by the companies own needs to get done what needs to be done and this then benefits customers and parteners.



The mobile app is the largest user of the public API.

Resource applications also use the public API. These import content from 3rd party providers. 

Webhooks is a notification mechanism to deliver real-time information and is also known as 
trigger, web callback, reverse API.

Oncology Nursing Society does microcredentialling, provision users, they use webhooks and the public API.
 


Industry standard specifications such as IMS Global are supported. LTI is supported.

The two apps above were apparently built by Schoology as a case of eating their own LTI dogfood.

We use Schoology to build Schoology. In the room is the founding CEO, founding Lead engineer, founding senior product manager. among other senior staff.

One school has the need to pull only the final exam grade, not all grades. Currently they have to pull the whole gradebook, grab the final examination grade, trash the rest. Could use more granularity. What drives API development? How do you decide what needs to be exposed? Answer centers on what comes in as customer and partner needs.f

At the end of the session I am two chairs over from the CEO. As I leave, I pass him a banana paper business card from Green Banana Paper and tell him our story as a small post-secondary institution on satellite links and the power and capability of his product in our environment.

With that session the conference comes to an end.



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