November 13 PD: Schoology, Mastery Manager, and Subtext

We offered a variety of professional development sessions each period for all eight periods on Thursday, November 13, 2014. The four 30-minute sessions I taught were:

• Schoology - Self Paced Lessons
• Schoology - Grading Rubrics
• Mastery Manager - Grading Rubrics
• Subtext

Schoology is gaining a great deal of interest due to the ability to tag all assessments and assignments with learning standards, create grading rubrics that are aligned to those standards, and then use a standards-based grading system. Teachers will schedule sessions to learn more about this through the Tech Boot Camp, Tech Buddies, and Tech Captains professional development sessions.

Mastery Manager is the software used for benchmark assessments that are aligned to curricular standards. It can capture a great deal of data regarding student and class performance and track those results over time. However, users say that it is cumbersome to use and that the online testing app is still buggy.

Subtext is software that allows students to read and annotate PDFs of books, textbooks and lecture notes. They can also digitally "raise their hand" to ask their peers for anonymous help. It is a great resource. A change to their pricing scheme slated to take effect July 2015 is keeping many teachers from pursuing the use of Subtext any further.