Schoology and Google Drive have finally come together in an [almost] perfect marriage. You can now make copies of Google Drive documents for students from within a Schoology assignment (all sharing permissions between you and each student are taken care of when you do this)! I got a sneak peak of this feature a few months back, and Schoology finally released it at their NEXT 2017 conference.
To do this, the teacher will need to install the Google Drive Assignments app from the Schoology app store (Schoology admins can install it for the whole school, but each teacher will need to authorize it). Then, when they create a Schoology assignment, you can attach a Google document (Doc, Slides, Drawing, Sheets…), and Schoology will make a copy of that template for each student and handle the sharing permissions between each student and teacher. It will create a corresponding Google Drive folder called “Schoology Google Drive Assignments.” Just ignore this folder so you don’t risk messing up the integration.
The student can open and access their Google document (Doc, Slides, Drawing, Sheets…) from the Schoology assignment and edit it just as if they were in the Google application. Then, the student can submit the document, which changes the document permissions to “view only” for students, so they can’t continue editing unless they click “unsubmit assignment” and the teacher has a record of this.
The teacher view of the students’ assignments looks different but is pretty straight forward. The teacher can flip back and forth between the live Google Doc view (without leaving Schoology) to give real-time feedback as the student is working, or they can view the submitted copy to use Google comments to give feedback. Teachers can still use the amazing Schoology rubrics to go through and grade the Google document, just like you previously could grade a Schoology assignment with rubrics.
If you use Schoology grading groups (on the Members page in your course) to individually assign an Assignment and attach a Google document to it, it will only make copies of that Google document for those students in that grading group (an individual copy for each student). Hello, differentiation!
Currently, this is only available in the web version. The mobile version is expected to be ready this coming fall 2017 sometime.
So what do you think of the new Schoology/ Google Drive integration? How will you use it in your class? What do you want to see in those future improvements to the integration?
Tech To You Later!
-Katie
Learning Schoology and cannot figure out how to grade submissions on my iPad as it just opens a standard Google Doc.