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Use the Assignment Feature to Manage Written Assignments

Why?

• Having a single location where you can grade, download, upload, and comment on student assignments reduces the amount of navigation for you.

Implications for Teaching and Learning.

• Routines are important for teaching success. Developing a routine for students to submit work and for you to grade and provide feedback helps make the technical part of the task easier. 
• Clearly telling students where they should submit assignments leaves little room for error.
• The assignment feature forces you to clear previously submitted assignments for resubmissions. This is useful if you wish to keep all assignments coming in via the Assignment feature.
• Automatically creates gradebook entries for each assignment.
• Grades created in the Assignment feature are automatically inserted into the gradebook.

Promising Practices for TWU.

• Build assignments first using the Assignment feature to populate your gradebook categories. 
• Communicate how to use the assignment feature and what to do if an assignment needs to be cleared from the gradebook.
• Explain the comment feature to students to allow questions and explanation to be included with the submission.

In the traditional face-to-face classroom, written papers and projects are turned in to the instructor for grading during class sessions. Most instructors create routines to handle collecting the papers and managing them until the grading is complete and the papers are returned to the students. The Assignment feature in Blackboard is invaluable in managing student assignments and submissions in a similar manner. This feature provides a single location to send assignment directions and information to students while providing students with a single location to upload assignments and comments. This tool automatically creates an item in the gradebook and has features to help instructors manage assignments.

Management Features.

• Automatically creates gradebook entries for each assignment
• Allows time-release options
• Setting availability dates makes the assignment disappear, stopping students from turning in late assignments
• Sets one gradebook item for the assignment, unlike the Digital Dropbox, where multiple files appear as multiple entries in the gradebook Instructors can access all student files and comments from the gradebook
• Grades assigned to an assignment automatically appear in the gradebook
• Instructors have the ability to download one, some, or all student submissions using the assignment tool from the gradebook
• Submissions can be downloaded to the instructor’s desktop, feedback added, and the file uploaded to the student in the assignment tool. 

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