Tuesday Tech Tip: 10 Great Ways to Use Schoology’s Media Albums With Your Class(es) or School

We love the media albums feature in Schoology.  Media albums are simple to create and use, but can be so powerful. Did you know that you can crop pictures in the album, rotate and re-order the pictures, and tag people in them? You can also decide if you want to enable comments, and if you want your students to be able post pictures and videos in the album. 

Remember, Schoology is password protected, so you can enjoy posting pictures here without them being publicly shared. However, if your course or group is public, your media album can also be made public. To learn how to create a media album, see Schoology's video directions by clicking here.  

Here is a screen capture of what a media album looks like, including some pictures and video:

If you're ready for ideas on how to incorporate media albums with your class or school, find 10 great ones below.

1, Show and Tell: Kids love to show off things that are too big to bring to school, or alive, or that they ate for dinner last night. They also want to show everyone things they (or their cats) do at home. Have them post those pictures and videos to your Schoology Show and Tell Media Album.
2. Vacation Pictures: Create a vacation media album and have your students post pictures and captions of where they are - in front of the Eiffel Tower, perhaps? The Statue of Liberty? A battlefield from the Civil War? Pull your students' pictures into your lessons when your class learns about those locations in history or current events, or even science. Other ideas: Have the student be "Teacher for the Day," teaching other students about where they went or add everyone's pictures to Google’s My Maps to document places the class has been.
3. Science Experiments: Have groups of students document the phases of an experiment in media albums with captions.  They can also add predictions or results of the experiments using the comments feature.
4. Field Trips: Bring your students’ parents with you (virtually) on your next field trip. You and your students can take pictures and post them to the media album so parents can experience the trip while you do.
5. School Events: Take pictures during poetry slams, the science fair, Veteran’s Day events, etc. to document exciting things happening at your school or in your class.
6. Athletics and Activities: Capture dances, plays, musicals, and sporting events after school.
7. Virtual Art Gallery: Have students upload photos of their artwork into a media album for others to comment on or just peruse.
8. Vocabulary Sets: For primary students, try having students take pictures of items that start with a certain letter. For foreign language classes, have students take pictures and label them in the caption with the word (or phrase) in the language they are learning.
9. P.E. Class: Take photos or videos of students performing an exercise correctly (or incorrectly) and post them for others to see and learn from.
10. Silent Auction: Take photos of items offered in a Silent Auction and post them with description and opening bid as the caption.  Have people comment to bid on the items.

Each item in your media album can be customized. Below is a screen cap of the options (click the green star icons to learn more about the features available).

We hope you will now have some new ideas for using Schoology's media albums. How will you use them with your class(es) or school?