The decision by the Los Angeles Unified School District to transfer from Jupiter Ed to Schoology has by far received positive remarks with the new grading system’s promising features.

“We didn’t decide,” Principal Deb Smith said. “The district decided and they’re not letting us buy Jupiter anymore starting next (school) year.”

Jupiter Ed was founded in 2004 with the intention to provide an easy way for teachers to input grades and for students and parents to check them. It has been used as the grading system here at Daniel Pearl Magnet High School for three years now and will continue to be until the end of the school year. So far, a few teachers have been experimenting with Schoology, while using Jupiter, in order to experience the new system as well as teach other teachers and students. The district requires all LAUSD schools to implement the new grading system and it will be the school’s grading system officially in August 2018.

“When we first started Jupiter, Schoology didn’t exist and we didn’t have an online grading system for parents and students on the web to see,” Smith said. “So we found out about Jupiter and we wanted you guys to have that access and your parents and so we bought it.”

Schoology was created by four college students with a vision to enhance the educational experience of students and teachers through advance technology. It comes with helpful resources and additional features, while its function remains the same as Jupiter. Some of the additional resources are different applications such as Khan Academy and YouTube. The system also enables teachers to see the schedules of students and know whether they have assignments, tests or projects coming up from other classes. The login username for Schoology is the student’s LAUSD email address, which is provided by the school.

“For my class when we do journals, the students can write it, they can video record themselves or they can do an audio recording, so those are different options,” history teacher Davy Mauermann said. ”Students can be creative in their assignments.”