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Schoolytics is a service that I’ve heard a lot about over the last few months. If you’re active on social media, you’ve probably seen a post or two about it too. Last week I finally got a chance to take a good look at it. To say I wish I had tried it sooner is an understatement.
At its core Schoolytics is a tool that ties together all of your Google Classroom information in one convenient place. Instead of having to look at each class individually to see who has missing assignments and view assignments that are awaiting feedback, you can do that from one dashboard for all of your classes. Additionally, you can send notes to students directly from your Schoolytics dashboard where you see all of your students in one place rather than having to do that from each individual class. But consolidation of Google Classroom information isn’t all that Schoolytics is useful for.
Schoolytics does more than just let you see all of your Google Classroom information in one place. It also helps you analyze how all of your students are doing across all of your classes. For example, Schoolytics will provide you with charts to view trends about things like assignment completion, assignment timeliness, and grade distribution. You can drill down through those trends by using Schoolytics tools like equity reports to find even more information about your students and the types of assignments that you are giving to them.
My Favorite Schoolytics Feature!
After I initially created my Schoolytics account and viewed my teacher dashboard I noticed a little prompt that included a little celebration emoji. The prompt read, “Send high fives to students!” I found that prompt intriguing and had to investigate it a bit. What I discovered was that “send high fives to students” is a little tool that you can use to send kudos to your students when they have reached an assignment completion goal that you have set for them. The default goal is an 85% on-time completion rate for assignments over the last 30 days.
You can set the standard for “high fives” in your Schoolytics account. If you want to make the high five interval shorter, say 15 days instead of 30, you can do that. If you want to make the on-time completion goal higher or lower than the default 85% goal, you can do that as well.
Sending high fives isn’t limited to just assignment completion goals. You can set goals based on points (scores) average for assignments and set goals for total assignments completed instead of completion percentages.
You can send high fives to your students privately or post them as announcements in your Google Classroom stream. I like the idea of posting the high fives as announcements as it’s a nice way to celebrate your students’ progress. At the same time, I understand that some students (or their parents) might not be comfortable with that and would prefer a private high five message. It’s great that Schoolytics provides you with an easy way to do both from one place.
Watch my short video that is embedded below to see how the high five feature works.
Identify and Catch Up With Disengaged Students
Disengaged Students is one of the many reports that Schoolytics will automatically generate for you. This report shows you at a glance the students in all of your classes that haven’t completed any assignments in a given range of dates. The default range is thirty days, but you can have Schoolytics generate a report for any range of dates from as short as seven days to as long as a whole school year. Once you’ve identified disengaged students, you can send them notes and reminders directly from your Schoolytics dashboard.
Schoolytics offers two convenient ways to remind students about missing assignments. You can first identify a student who has missing assignments and send them a reminder of all of their assignments (watch this video for a demo). Alternatively, you can run a Missing Assignments Report and email all students at once to remind them of the assignments they missed.
Customize, Save, and Share Reports
As I mentioned above, the Schoolytics dashboard has a good selection of default report types that you can generate. All of those reports can be saved in your Google Drive and or downloaded as PDFs and CSV files that you can print. Having printed copies of those reports could be helpful in meetings with students, parents, guidance counselors, and administrators.
In addition to the standard report types offered by Schoolytics, you can also generate progress reports on any interval of your choosing for individual students, for whole classes, and for your entire student roster across all of your classes. You’ll find the progress reports option in your Schoolytics Toolkit.
The Schoolytics Toolkit has some other helpful features including a random group generator, a manual group creation tool, assignment creation tools, and assignment reuse options.
Learn More, Join a Free Workshop!
I’ve only scratched the surface of the many ways that Schoolytics could be helpful to you throughout the school year. The best way to see all of the potential for Schoolytics is to give it a try for yourself. It’s completely free for individual teachers to use. Schoolytics also offers free online workshops every week where you can learn the latest tips and tricks from their team of in-house experts. Sign up here!
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