Throughout K-12 Education there is an ever increasing need to implement technology into the curriculum, but many teachers struggle with the new technology because they aren't comfortable with it. IN the High School, we have adopted Schoology across the board as our LMS of choice for any online activities. The administration has added certain requirements for all teachers to have at least a basic inclusion of Schoology in every one of their classes. Every teacher in the school has risen to the challenge and everyone is using Schoology in at least a basic capacity where they have assignments, tests, and information up for their students to access. For many of the more ambitious teachers who are going beyond Schoology's basic functionality and are looking for ways to run their classes more efficiently, they are spending large amounts of time figuring out Schoology's more advanced functions to end up utilizing features inefficiently. Schoology has a help section where teachers can search out information about using every aspect of the site, but it has proven to be less than intuitive to find anything other than the basic functions. Many teachers have found that it is actually easier to search for a topic on Google, find a forum where a solution is posted, and then follow that advice. A few teachers are tenacious enough to go through all that, but most just continue wasting extra time and effort or never attempt to use Schoology's advanced features at all. Many teachers became discouraged at the amount of time they were spending to try and figure out how to work with these features to the point where they were just skipping them altogether. Others were spending many extra hours over the course of a year performing functions that could have been completed much more efficiently.

​

I set about creating a series of guides to be shared with teachers in the High School and Middle School that would showcase Schoology's advanced features, and provide suggestions on easier ways to use Schoology. I began with guides that dealt with different aspects of assessments. Using text and screenshots, I gave a step-by-step account of the process for teachers to follow when working with the more advanced functions. To begin I spent time pouring over Schoology's help section and looked at what had been covered in in-services that every teacher had been through. Finding the proper place to begin was important, since I didn't want top waste time covering content that could be easily found elsewhere. My research basically showed me that while many teachers had a firm grasp of adding materials, links, and even basic assessments, they didn't understand all of the different options available to them when creating assessments. They didn't see how they could create rubrics to make their grading lives easier, or how to create question banks to enhance test security. There were a great many topics that I found to create guides for, but as I finished more of them I began to see even more use by combining them into a single idea, such as steps to set up classes, categories, etc. to start the year efficiently. By looking at the advanced functions from a different point of view I created some much longer, but more useful guides. I didn't get top finish all of the guides I wanted to by the end of my internship, and I plan on continuing to write some more. I did get to lead a faculty meeting and in-service on some of the features I wrote about, both of which proved to be pretty popular and successful, reassuring me that I was on the right track to begin with.