Best Practices
For UPrep's minimum expectations for Schoology use, see Schoology Requirements. This page covers implementation tips and additional features to help you meet — and go beyond — those requirements.
Organization and Prioritization
Folders are crucial for students being able to access the relevant and current resources in your course. Please identify your folders with a meaningful title and heading. Other options include color coding certain folders. Try and envision how students will navigate the structure of your course to find what they need. A good rule of thumb is that the first page of the course should contain folders, under which all of your course content resides. Common strategies include:
- Folders for each unit,
- Folders for certain date ranges, or
- Folders for types of material (e.g., Homework, Readings, Daily Practice)
If there is a resource, link, or activity that students will need to access regularly throughout the course, consider putting it in a separate folder (such as “Toolkit” or “Common Resources”) at the top of your page.
Keep materials no more than three levels deep: students should never need more than two clicks from your course home page to reach a resource — your course (level 1) → a unit or topic folder (level 2) → at most one more folder of related materials (level 3). If you find yourself nesting folders inside folders inside folders, it's a sign to flatten your structure.
Be careful with "Unpublish." Unpublishing a folder doesn't just hide it from students — depending on your school's Schoology configuration, it can also pull every assignment inside that folder out of the gradebook. Don't use Unpublish as a way to tidy up a cluttered course; archive old folders instead, or ask June if you're not sure which to use.
Creating Assignments
There are many options in setting up an assignment within Schoology. While these may seem daunting at first, they are each important to make sure that both faculty and students can access the information we need reliably and efficiently. Feel free to print this page as a checklist to help you build the habits for good assignment hygiene.
Schoology's Assignments Quick Reference Card
Due Dates
The class calendar is the most common time management and organizational tool that students use to organize their tasks, so complete and accurate due dates make a real difference for student organization. See Schoology Requirements for which assignments must be calendared.
Submission Method
By default, Schoology assumes that assignments will be submitted electronically. If you do not want to receive this assignment through Schoology, you must turn off the "Submissions" feature while creating the assignment. Otherwise, Schoology will assume that the assignment is missing, and erroneously notify students that their work is missing. This has the unfortunate side effect of training students to ignore all missing assignment notifications, whether accurate or not.
Resources
Schoology allows you to attach links or supplemental files to an assignment. If there are files or websites which a student should use to complete an assignment, please attach them directly to the assignment so that students may easily find them. If the resource will be used beyond that assignment, for example throughout a unit or throughout the term, consider putting it in the most appropriate folder and leaving instructions on where students will find it.
Paw Ratings
Use the Paw Ratings chart to estimate a student's workload for a task, and indicate the rating with the corresponding number of *** in the assignment title. Read the Paw Ratings Implementation guide for more detail. See Schoology Requirements for when Paw Ratings are required and the full naming convention.
Workload Calendar
The Workload Calendar is a separate class for each grade level, 9-12, which exists to show us the overall picture of how many assignments, assessments, etc., students are balancing at a time. Once you have created an assignment, copy it to the appropriate grade level Workload Calendar using the "Copy to Course" feature.
See the Upper School Workload Calendaring Expectations for naming conventions and guidance on what should be cross-posted.
Grading
UPrep's preferred gradebook tool is the one integrated in Schoology, which offers several attractive benefits for teachers and students:
- The gradebook is automatically populated when you create your assignments, meaning you do not have to maintain a separate gradebook.
- Your feedback to students will be linked to the assignment directly so it is easy for them to see your comments or score.
- As many classes already use the gradebook, students will likely be familiar with how to navigate it and see your comments.
- Students and parents frequently cite the gradebook as one of the most helpful tools in supporting students' performance in class, and in particular tracking overdue or missing work.
Please consider these guidelines:
- Publish grades to students either:
- In your class if useful for discussion or feedback sessions, or
- Outside of school hours, so as not to pull students' attention from their other activities.
- If you want to weight certain assignments by either term, or category, do this at the beginning of the course as much as possible. Changing weighting during the term may change a student's grade in a way which is surprising to them.
- Familiarize yourself with the options to show or hide overall grades in the Grade Setup screen according to your preferences. In Middle School, please disable all overall grades (a percentage output) so as not to confuse students with an "overall percentage grade" which is in contrast to our Standards-Based Grading.
- Take a few minutes in your class to orient students to where you will post feedback. You may wish to leave specific, detailed feedback on the assignment submission, for example, or high-level summary comments in the gradebook. You may use either, both, or neither of those options, but please be consistent and communicate your intent to students.
- Familiarize yourself with Gradebook Exceptions (flags), as they are convenient tools to communicate necessary information to students — see below.
See Schoology Requirements for gradebook backup and accuracy requirements that apply regardless of how you grade.
Gradebook Exceptions (Flags)
Hover over any gradebook cell and click the flag icon to apply an exception. Exceptions let you communicate something about a student's submission status without changing the raw score. Schoology currently offers six exception types:
- Missing — functions the same as a zero in grade calculations. Use this only when you don't want the student to be able to submit the work anymore.
- Incomplete — stays on the student's Overdue list and does not affect the grade calculation. Use this if you're accepting a late submission but don't want the gap to count against the student in the meantime.
- Exempt — removes the item from grade calculations entirely, so it neither helps nor hurts the student's grade. (Called "Excused" in older Schoology versions.)
- Absent, Late, and Collected — additional exceptions that remove the item from a student's Overdue notifications; use whichever best describes the submission's status.
See Schoology's Use Exceptions in the Gradebook documentation for full definitions.
Copying Grade Settings to Another Course
If you teach multiple sections or courses with the same grading structure, you don't need to rebuild Grade Setup from scratch each time. From Grade Setup, click Copy Settings in the upper right, choose which elements to copy (Categories, Grading Scales, and/or Rubrics), and select the destination course(s). You must be a Course Admin on the destination course to copy settings into it.
A word of caution: Copy Settings does not copy your Visibility Settings, Grading Periods, or Final Grade Settings. You'll still need to configure those individually for each course, according to your division's requirements (see above).
See Schoology's Grade Setup documentation for more detail.
To learn more about the Schoology Gradebook, please see the materials below, or e-mail June.
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