Course Materials: Assignments

Creating an assignment

From the Course Materials page, use the Add Materials drop-down menu to create an assignment. You can also access the Add Materials button from within a folder.

1. Click Add Materials.
2. Select Add Assignment.
3. Fill out the Create Assignment form.
   • Enter a Description. Here, you can enter the directions your students will need to complete the assignment
   • Set a Due Date to place the assignment in the Course Calendar and Upcoming area. This will also enable Overdue notifications if a student fails to submit the assignment by the due date.
   • Select a Grading Category from the dropdown. If you do not select a grading category, it will default to Ungraded, and will not appear in your gradebook.

   • Automatically Publish Grades: Selecting Automatically Publish Grades will immediately display student grades in the gradebook for parents and students. 

     

     Assignments with Automatically publish scores disabled, that are synced to PowerSchool SIS, will set the Publish Scores settings within PowerTeacher Pro gradebook to be disabled as well. Any other SIS integration will not honor this setting in the sync to SIS option.

   • Collected Type: Selecting Collected will disable the ability to add a traditional score to the assignment.

     

     • Collected Type assignments will passback to PowerTeacher Pro gradebook with the score type of Collected Only. Other SIS integrations will present these assignments as any other assignment with a grade column. 
     • Districts using District Mastery may use Collected Only assignments with objective alignments to continue to grade for mastery. Districts using Classic Mastery can use a rubric with an objective attached to allow for mastery only grading.
   • Select a Scale or Rubric from the dropdown menu.

   • Align Learning Objectives to add custom learning objectives, Common Core, Next Generation Science Standards, ACTFL Standards for Foreign Language Learning, College and Career Readiness Standards for Adult Education, AERO Curriculum Frameworks, or State Standards.
     Enterprise users: Once you have aligned your material with learning objectives, use the Mastery tool to track your students' progress
     
     

     

     Common Core, NGSS, College and Career Readiness Standards for Adult Education, and State Standards are consistently updated in Schoology. Any learning objective titles that contain a year indicate the original publication date and not the most recent update.

4. Options: Use Options to turn on/off the following features:
   • Use Individually Assign to only display the assignment to a specific member of the course or a grading group.
   • Lock prevents students from making submissions. You may want to lock the assignment after the due date has passed.
   • Enable Submissions: Click the dropbox icon to provide an area for students to submit work. You can opt to disable submissions if the assignment does not require something in return from the student - for example, reading homework.
   • Published to student: opt to show or hide the assignment from the student view.
   • Grade Statistics displays the statistics for the assignments to students, which is located in an icon above assignment submissions.
   • Enable Comments: This allows students to comment on the assignment.
   • Copy to Courses: Copy the assignment with the current settings and options to another course.

   • Count in Grade Enabled: This marks a material to be included in final grade calculations. 
     
     

     

     Assignments with Count in Grade disabled, that are synced to PowerSchool SIS, will set the Count in Grade settings within PowerTeacher Pro gradebook to be disabled as well. Any other SIS integration will not honor this setting in the sync to SIS option.

   • PowerBuddy: Enable PowerBuddy to allow PowerBuddy chat in the assignment.

     • Select to use the Informative or Socratic mode. Informative mode provides direct explanations in response to students' questions, and the Socratic mode asks questions to help guide the student through the topic.
     • Choose whether to allow students to review their chat history for the assignment.
5. Click Create to complete.

Assignment display

Once you click Create, the description and any additional files or links will display on the assignment, along with the Submissions and comment tools. From this page, you can manage assignment submissions, grade students, and participate in the comments area.

Assignment submissions

When a student submits an assignment, you will receive a notification.

You can access Submissions from the Assignment, and by clicking the Assignment listed in the Calendar. Use this area to manage student-submitted files.

Submitted files are organized by On Time and Late, based on the assignment's Due Date. You can download or review each individual file, or you can download all assignments in a bulk .zip file.

The Download All option has a limit of 500MB. If the cumulative size of all submissions to the assignment exceeds this limit, each submission can be downloaded individually from the document viewer.

Grading assignments

Document viewer

The Document Viewer enables you to review and/or annotate student assignment submissions directly through your Schoology account. To use the Document Viewer, click on a submission.

In the Document Viewer, you can:

• Comment and discuss in the right column.
• Review the date and time submitted for each submission.
• Upload a file to the comment/discussion feed.
• Highlight selected text.
• Comment in the document.
• Strikeout selected text.
• Draw on the document.
• Grade the assignment.
• Download the file and save it on your computer.

• Return the annotated/graded assignment to the student by clicking Save Changes.
  
  

  

  • The Schoology Doc Viewer supports the following file types: CSV, DOC, DOCX, DXF, EPS, GIF, HTM, HTML, JPEG, JPG, MP3, MP4, MOV, ODP, ODS, ODT, PDF, PNG, PPT, PPTX, PSD, RTF, SXW, TIFF, TXT, WAV, WMV, WPD, WPS, XLS, XLSB, XLSX, and XML. The submission viewer does not convert Apple Pages, Numbers, or Keynote files, but you may download these submissions onto your computer. You cannot annotate all file types (media files, for example) using the Annotation toolbar.
  • While there is no limit to the number of files you can attach, you must upload each file individually. Schoology has a size limit of 512 MB per file.

Returning assignments

The Submissions Viewer feature enables you to return assignments to students by clicking the Save Changes button. If you use a third-party annotation program, you can upload your revised document to the comments/discussion area of the student's submission.

If you plan to have students submit multiple revisions of the same assignment, you can leave comments, where you will see a history of submissions and comments.

To delete any comments posted by you or the student, hover the cursor over the comment and click X, then click Submit to confirm.

You can enter a grade directly on a submission of the document display.

When you click the Grade field, you can enter a grade based on the grading scale or rubric you selected while creating the assignment, along with a comment. The comment entered here will be displayed in the gradebook. It will also display in the student's Grades area of the course. You can choose not to display the comments by unchecking Show to Student. After entering a grade and a comment, click Submit to save.