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Schoology seems like a great app to use for school & everything going on this year especially with COVID-19, but is it really? All the students are having a hard time trying to figure out everything with it. The due dates are too small, you can’t delete submissions you didn’t mean to send, very unorganized, and doesn’t say the assignment are done even after you submit your response. This is a terrible way to have many students focus on school. The courses you are in show up alphabetically and not in order, which can be very stressful and hard on students who like to be organized or have OCD and need to have it a specific way. The notifications are on the home screen of the app, instead they should have each class, like google classroom, with the due date and time, so you can click the assignment and it’s easy. The folders in the course class are also very hard to understand. Instead of all the assignments popping up you should just be able to click a certain folder and open it and get what you need. Also, when submitting a Google Document or a Word assignment, the assignment gets all messed up when submitted, which can ruin your students grade. This school year, needs to be organized & easy, for all our online, in school, & hybrid students. This is not an organized app for any school to use. Too messy for anyone. Even the teachers are confused on everything. Terrible app. Not recommended.

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.

Aside from how unorganized the app is, the features it lacks, and how the Home Screen resembles Facebook, I want to talk about “bugs.” Are they bugs? I don’t know. So, I don’t get email if I get a missing assignment, nor is there a menu to see any missing assignments, which needs to be added. However, my parents get an email pretty much right after the assignment is declared late. And here’s another thing: the way schoology counts missing assignments is weird. If an assignment hasn’t been graded EVEN IF THE ASSIGNMENT ISN’T DUE YET, my parents get an email about it, and it adds all sorts of confusion. And in a time where I have to work pretty much exclusively using schoology during the pandemic, it adds all sorts of unnecessary stress. Another thing with the app, when you open another page, like a course, calendar, etc. That’s like opening a new tab in a browser. So if I accidentally miss click, there’s another 30 seconds of waiting because even though I have pretty decent WiFi, schoology servers are being overloaded because of terrible optimization for students. Definitely nitpicking on that, but it needs to be overstated. I know this review will get another automated response and the devs will do nothing about it, but maybe if we spam the app with bad reviews, it will hopefully be removed, and that’s what I’m going for. I hate this app, I have no idea why my school district adopted it. Thank you for listening to my Ted Talk.