Now that the mask mandate has been lifted and common colds are back in full swing, I caught a cold and ended up missing a whole week of school and with that fell behind on many classes and their assignments. In my attempts to catch up on missed work, I found myself having to scour all my classes’ Schoology pages to find the missing assignments from each day. It wasn’t as simple as just checking the calendar like it once was. 

With each of my teachers using different methods to post their classwork and assignments, I struggled to make sure I was finding everything I had missed. At the beginning of the year, it was established that all teachers would have a similar layout to their Schoology pages and would therefore have a folder for every week of the year. This is still true, however, just because the teachers have said folders on their page, doesn’t mean there is anything in the folders. Many of my teachers leave their folders empty but with a brief layout for the week. Others have their folders chalked full of links and posts, but upon further inspection, it’s hard to tell which ones are obligatory for study and which are miscellaneous. There are also a large number of teachers who don’t use the site at all and instead rely on you to ask your classmates what you missed and how to catch up.

When it comes to the Schoology calendar, I would say it’s used by about a third of my teachers. But to what extent? Some use it with great detail and that is really helpful, while others only put the unit tests on the calendar. And again, most don’t use it at all. Additionally, I have one teacher who chooses not to use the Schoology calendar, but has instead created their own calendar of sorts which is linked on their page. At first, this seems helpful, and to some extent it is. But in order to truly benefit students to the fullest potential, teachers should put their assignments and class work on the Schoology calendar so students can have one place where they can look and find everything they need. It’s hard to catch up when every teacher uses Schoology differently, or simply doesn’t use it at all.