This week we’re going to discuss one of the most powerful parts of the Learn VLE, and one which can reduce your workload and bring a lot more things online. Everything I’ll be doing today will cover setting up and administrating the homework – next week we’ll be showing you how to “set and forget” a whole term’s worth of it!
To start with, go to the Learnsite you want to embed the homework on – whether this is a dedicated page or part of another one is up to you. Enter Edit mode and click Insert > Exercise.

Once you’ve chosen where to put it, the following dialog will pop up:

Give it a descriptive title and explain the exercise in the two free-text boxes. The checkboxes below let you customise how you’d like it to present. The due date will stop accepting responses after a set time and date, while enabling feedback will let you give more detailed responses to students’ work.
Now you can save and publish the page, because as far as the editing is concerned, you’re all done – School Jotter will take care of the rest. Here’s what an exercise will look like – your students’ version will be identical but without the “See the results” link in the top right.

When your students access the page they’ll be invited to upload and submit files – alternatively, if you have Office 365 integration, they can be imported directly from OneDrive, and once done will see this page:

Now let’s go back to you as a teacher/administrator. Clicking on “See the results” at the top of your document will bring you here:

I’ve already graded the submissions of pupils 1 and 2, so let’s take a look at pupil 3 and grade their work. Click a student’s username and you’ll see this screen:

Through the boxes at the bottom you can assign a grade and score (make sure to click the “Save grade” and “Save score” buttons!). Additionally, the “Add new feedback” button will bring up a free text box, allowing you to give more detailed feedback. Once this is all filled out, the student will receive a notification when visiting their version of the page informing them that they have feedback – they can also respond to this as a comment, and so can you.

As you saw earlier on the results screen, you’re able to view the grades of the whole class as a handy list, as well as seeing who’s submitted their work! Even after the time has expired, pupils (and teachers) can of course go back in and see results.
Want to try this out for yourself? Check out the Learn app in the app store, you can get a 30-day trial for free!
Don’t miss next week’s tip, where I’ll be showing you how to use timed content objects to let you create an entire term’s worth of homework in one go!
Want these tips delivered straight to your inbox every week? Sign up here!