Schoology

I am a student and no I am not just rating this app low so I don’t have to use it. I’m not a big fan of it. I had high hopes for this website/app, my school district said this was a lot better, apparently. Despite my mother, who is a school teacher, who had to learn how to use Schoology in 3 short months. I was optimistic. The first day of my senior year, it crashed. No one was able to log on, even people who had signed in the night before to hopefully stay on the site they were kicked out and sent to an error page. I did not appreciate my “last, first day” of high school being ruined by a new app that was supposed to be more accessible. On top of that I had to teach myself to navigate around Schoology and I have to manually connect my google drive to the app EVERY DAY! It gets quite bothersome and sometimes makes me run late to zoom meetings. I downloaded the app on my phone in hopes to maybe make it more accessible, but I cannot see my assignments unless there is a google doc or slide attached, this makes it very difficult to complete work when I cannot use my computer. There are a lot of things that could be improved, but I do appreciate the grades portion. It shows you what you are missing and shows if you’ve turned it, and if it has been graded, unlike google classroom that would count everything late even if there wasn’t an assignment attached. I hope to see improvements in the near future. I’m not a big fan, but hopefully my mind can change soon.

The website of Schoology is very good. It is useful for school, especially during coronavirus quarantine because we have to learn from home. However, the app is not as good as the website. When I check the notifications, it doesn’t show me the new ones. Even after refreshing, it still just shows the old notifications. Then, after it finally shows me the new ones, the “notifications” section still has a red dot on it. (Even after the most recent update) When I close the app, it still says that there are a bunch of notifications. I also have trouble accessing links sometimes. Also, when a link actually works, the website it goes to always shows up in a pop-up. It never shows up in an actual browser. Another problem is that it takes forever to upload a video, which is a problem when I’m trying to submit a recorded project. A summary of my review: The website is great, but the app needs some bug fixes. Edit: Most of the links work, but there are still a few that don’t work. I’m still having problems with the notifications. When I checked the app this morning, it said that I had over 50 notifications. I did the same things: open notifications, refresh, go back to home page, refresh, go back to notifications, refresh. I repeated this process several times and I think I refreshed the page about 10 times, but there were still 50. I had to restart my iPad and then refresh 3 more times to get rid of that 50. There is still 1.

worse app every its’s so unorganized Schoology itself is a poorly designed system that attempts to turn what ought to be like a project management system into a friendly Facebook like interface, resulting in a system that is bad at being either. It is confusing and difficult for students and parents to navigate and actually know what needs to be done when. This is largely because it doesn’t enforce any standardized input from teachers, because it isolated courses from each other too much, and for parents, because they have to navigate to each student and then within each student to each course in a way that far too often requires two steps. For example, clicking on “courses” seems to open a page, but it’s really just a modal. So the user thinks that after selecting a course, they can click back to get to the courses list. Instead, you go back to the page before. The iOS app makes all this worse because it’s not a true native app, it’s a custom web browser that wraps the website. It cannot, however, display certain kinds of content internally like the website can. It tells you the content is unavailable. Most of it you can actually get to if you zoom in and find the external link, but this is very poor UI design. I would recommend school systems not spend the enormous amount of money this system must cost. As for the rest of us - we’re stuck with the schools’ bad decision, but you’re slightly better off going to a computer and avoiding the app whenever possible