Google Classroom vs Schoology

 As my school started looking to ditch Schoology for Google Classroom last year, many of my colleagues and I were not too happy. Change is always difficult, but it is terribly frustrating when a school adopts a technology platform only to change their minds years later. This was clearly the case and although we had no idea what the reason was for the impending change, many educators were seriously considering a technological revolt!  I had nearly five years of content between nearly a dozen courses. I had finally developed a curriculum for robotics I, II, III, and IV as well as middle school robotics and unmanned aerial systems (drones).   There were other courses that I'd developed, taught, and then passed on to colleagues. In short, I had thousands of hours invested in developing lessons that would need to be recreated if we moved to Google Classroom.

To be fair, I'm an avid Google fan and have been using their suite of products for over a decade. Before returning to the classroom eight years ago, I was the technology director in several school districts and made educational technology decisions often. I also use the Google suite for my property management and investment business, so I'm very familiar with the collaborative and technical workings of Google. Still, dumping all of my courses was just not something I wanted to face.

Fast forward to this school year. I left my previous teaching post and started at a new school that strictly used Google Classroom. I now had NO choice. I started moving my courses over to Google and have actually found that many of the options are more intuitive and the best feature is that I can comment right in the google doc. A major disadvantage is that there is no direct connection between Google Classroom and Powerschool and will likely never be as PowerSchool owns Schoology. 

Although I still feel that Schoology has many benefits over Google Classroom, I'm starting to get into the new learning management system offered by Google and once I can move most of my content over and teach in a more traditional, in class manner (without Covid-19 impacting my students), I'll post an update of how the two LMSs stack up.

- Dr. Po 

Robert Polselli
Engineering and Robotics Teacher
Killingly High School
Killingly, CT