Marking homework and assignments is a juggling act for teachers, and finding the time to create and grade student work after a busy week in the classroom can be exhausting.
What’s more, while many educators strive to create engaging assignments and provide meaningful feedback for their classes, this feels almost impossible for most as more responsibilities and deadlines pile up.
In this guide, we aim to alleviate some of that stress and give you some actionable tips on assignment creation, grading and feedback.
At Cloud Design Box, we’re passionate about helping the educators we work with. We support schools and multi academy trusts (MATs) across the UK to deliver a more connected and collaborative way of teaching and learning. Find out more.
This guide is split into three sections:
- Saving hours on assignment creation with Microsoft Teams
- Saving time marking and grading assignments
- Boosting student engagement in homework and assignments
How to save hours on assignment creation with Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Class Teams Assignments supports you in creating, distributing and grading all your class assignments.
You can manage assignment timelines and deadlines, add clear instructions for your student, attach resources and worksheets, and much, much more.
Creating a new assignment in Teams Assignments is easy:
- Go to your Class Team and select Assignments.
- Tap Create then New assignment.
- From here, you can enter a title for the assignment, add instructions, rubrics and a due date.
- You also have the option to add the assignment to a Class Module for your classwork. More about Classwork here.
- You can also add a Grading Category and Scheme.
- Select who you want to assign it to – you can choose the whole class, multiple classes or specific groups of students.
- Hit Assign to assign the work. Alternatively, you can select Save to save it as a draft.
Extra time-saving tips for creating new assignments in Class Teams
Below are some bonus time-saving tips for teachers creating homework assignments:
- Quickly assign homework to multiple classes at once.
- Batch create and schedule assignments.
- Easily reuse assignments from previous years.
- Import assignment settings from another Class Team.
Keep reading to find out more.
Quick assign to multiple classes
Tap the dropdown menu and select the classes you want to assign the work to. Search specific names in the search bar.
Schedule assignments
Save time by batch-creating assignments and scheduling them into the future. Simply tap the arrow on the Assign button to schedule the assignment for a later date.
Reuse previous assignments
Got a piece of homework that worked well in the past? Reuse last year’s assignments for your current class.
Import assignment settings into a Class Team
Teachers have the ability to import assignment settings from one class to another. This means you can copy the guidelines, submission deadlines and notification settings, without needing to manually set everything each time.
How to save time marking and grading assignments
With Teams Assignments, you can add grades and give feedback directly to your students in a few clicks.
As a teacher, you’re able to see at a glance who has handed in assignments and use the To return and Returned tabs to sort through your workload.
With the new updates that arrived in 2023, you’re also able to filter forthcoming, ready-to-grade, past due, returned and draft assignments.
The Ready to Grade tab is a favourite of ours because if you find that you’ve got a little bit of marking time, you can jump in and see if there are any assignments ready to grade.
You can also clear your Assignment list of inactive assignments by tapping Mark as inactive. This removes it from the Due section and prevents students from accessing it.
Quickly view assignments for individual students – Effortlessly search for a student and view all of their Microsoft Teams assignments with Cloud Box.
Teachers and senior leadership can get a quick overview of individual student workloads and the status of their assignments in just a few clicks.
Weighted grading categories
In Assignments, you can set weighted grading categories in advance. For example, homework at 40% and in-class assignments at 60%. Being able to do this in advance saves a lot of time when calculating grades at the end of term.
Return assignments to multiple students
Save time by returning work to multiple students – or even the whole class – at once.
Leave video feedback for students
Verbal and video feedback can be left on assignments, which is a great alternative to typing. Not only mixing up the monotony of marking for teachers but also adding a deeper level of communication with students.
Attach OneDrive files, documents, whiteboards, links and more to assignment feedback
Selecting the paperclip allows you to attach a OneDrive or Teams Assignment document or include a link to an external website. Meanwhile, the plus sign allows you to attach a Microsoft Office document, presentation, spreadsheet or whiteboard.
Boost student engagement in homework and assignments
All teachers endeavour to inspire learners. It’s why you got into the profession in the first place, right?
But, creating assignments that truly captivate and engage students can be difficult. We know it’s important to set tasks that are both interesting and challenging, but this can be difficult with the current time pressures in schools.
With Microsoft Teams Assignments, you can quickly mock up engaging assignments, attach interactive worksheets and even create timed quizzes for your class to complete.
Here are just some ideas:
- Create interactives quizzes for assignments
- Create video guides (and reuse them every year)
- Set Microsoft Whiteboards as homework tasks
- Leverage Microsoft Learning Accelerators
- Get students involved in their own learning
Keep reading below to see how.
Create interactive quizzes for assignments
Microsoft Forms is a great tool for making quizzes to test class comprehension. And, you can easily attach a Form to your assignments in Teams.
Additionally, self marking quizzes are great for giving instant feedback to the respondees – if you’re a teacher, you could set self-marking quizzes to help students revise a topic or reflect on a lesson.
You can use quizzes to quickly gauge which students may need extra support with the topic, or you can add timers to help the class practice for more formal assessments.
See our guide on adding Quiz Timers in Microsoft Teams Assignments.
Create video guides and reuse them year after year
There’s no way of getting around it, video content is simply more engaging than the written word.
Record video guides for the key topics your students need to know about and reuse them year after year.
With Cloud Box, you can easily build an online library of all your learning resources and easily roll over everything every academic year.
So while recording video may take a little time upfront, once they’re created, you can store, share and reuse the content any time you like.
Set Microsoft Whiteboards as a homework task
Whiteboards in Teams are a fantastic way of diversifying the types of assignments you set. And you can create new ones with just a few taps.
What’s more, you can easily reuse previously created whiteboards for students to add to.
Leverage Microsoft Learning accelerators
Some of the Microsoft Learning Accelerators, such as Reading Coach and Progress, make brilliant homework assignments.
They allow students to practice and improve their confidence with reading aloud and pronunciation of English and a wide range of other languages.
Students can read out loud to the reading coach in the comfort of their own homes, and it responds with helpful feedback to improve accuracy and highlight any words the student has struggled with.
Teachers can then look at the recordings and results to view accuracy, mispronunciations, repetitions, omissions and more.
Source: Microsoft Education
Get students involved in their own learning
For older students, it can be particularly empowering and motivating to have the ability to view their own progress.
In Teams, they can view their average grades and trends over time.
We hope that this guide gave you some ideas about how you and your colleagues can embrace Microsoft Teams and SharePoint to help you cut down on admin tasks and focus more hours on the bits you love about teaching.
If you’d like more support with digital transformation at your school or trust, give us a call on (+44) 01482 688890 to book a chat or book a demo with our experts.
