Schoology: Save Course Materials to Your Resources

Wrap Up the School Year in Style With This Must-See Webinar

Summer break has finally arrived! Are you ready? O.K., so you've stocked up on sunscreen and dusted off that old pair of sunglasses on your dresser, but what about all that instructional content you created over the last nine months? What happens to it once the year ends?

On Schoology, preparing for the end of the year (and the beginning of the next year) is simple when you follow the best practices. And it just so happens that we have a wonderfully helpful video webinar on this particular subject.

If you're interested in knowing how to quickly save your content, build new curricula effectively, and repurpose existing resources, then this webinar is the perfect start. Enjoy!

Wrapping Up the End of the Year... Now What?

Watch the webinar here: Schoology Webinar-Wrapping Up the Year...Now What from Schoology on Vimeo.

Webinar Highlights and Topics

The following are topics featured in this webinar that you may be particularly interested in. The time next to each corresponds with where the topic is discussed in the video.

• Overview for Saving Course Materials [1:00]
• How Can I Organize and Share My Resources? [3:07]
• Saving Courses to Resources Walkthrough [5:52] 
• Best Practice--Creating Collections in Resources before Saving Course Materials [8:10]
• Saving and Reusing Inactive (Past) Courses [9:58]
• Building Curricula Over the Summer [12:42]
• Collaborative Curriculum Development [14.21]
• Sharing Content with Other Educators [18:30]
• Creating and Adding Group Resources [19:07]
• Adding Resources into Your Courses [12:22]

Webinar Q&A

Below is a list of great questions we received during this webinar along with their answers: 

• Is there a limit of folders or courses we can save?

  There is no limit.

• Can I share courses across my two accounts that I have linked?

  You will need to use a collection and share it with the other account or put the resources in a common group.

• Can I save all contents from all courses for all teachers as an administrator?

  No, each instructor needs to be responsible for their own content.

• When reusing a discussion question, how can we get rid last year's students' responses?

  The discussion thread will be part of your archived courses. When you bring in the discussion, it will only have the original discussion content and not the students' responses.

• We are having summer training and wanted our leaders to show other teachers their assignments, grades, and tests. How can we do that?

  This can be done by having the instructor select the Courses dropdown menu, select See All, go to the Archived tab, and open the section they want to show the content and grades for.

• When do classes disappear for enterprise schools with Powerschool?

  Courses will become archived once the last grading term tied to that course ends. They will not disappear and will always be accessible by the course administrator.

• What if you made changes to folders in Resources after they've been added to your courses? Will folders in your courses reflect the change?

  No. When you bring in content from Resources it is a copy, so any changes you make to the resources after they are brought over would need to be brought over again. Or you can make the change in the course, save the new version to Resources, and delete the old version.

• Do archived courses ever expire?

  No. Archived courses do not expire.

• What is the best way to hide a course until you're ready to use it?

  You cannot hide a course but you can hide content within the course. This can be done at the highest folder level by choosing an appropriate Availability option: Hidden, Available after start date, or Available during date range. On another note, you can set visibility on a single course material as well.

• Aside from saving course materials to Resources, can current student work be saved for me to use as exemplars next year?

  You could look at saving a student’s work as a resource and uploading it as an example, but it may be easier just to access it from the Archived Courses area and show it to your students on a projector.

• What is a good time frame to go to the full process of creating a course on Schoology? 

  This is a matter of personal preference. You can begin at any time by using folders and/or collections in Resources or by creating a "shell" course to build materials in.

• When you import the old resources, do they come over unpublished or published? Do I need to switch all the due dates?

  The resource will come in published and you will want to configure dates and grading criteria for the resource.

• Past courses are connected to a grading period, and our list of grading periods is getting long since we have been using Schoology a few years. How, as an admin, can I delete past grading periods? Or can I "hide" them? 

  At this time they cannot be deleted or hidden. We would recommend posting this as a feature request.

• If we do a rollover inside of PowerSchool and are syncing with Schoology, when the new courses hit Schoology do the old courses remain archived or inactive?

  The old courses will remain archived.

• What happens to grade data in an archived course? Is it still available for future review?

  Yes. You can access the archived class file and go to the Gradebook. There you will see the old grade data.

• Link to tutorial.