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!

Over on Schoolanywhere.co.uk we’ve been taking a look at homework workloads and how to make it all just that bit more managable. We’ve examined three different areas that people can struggle with in homework: managing stress, getting it done and marking it. We even have a podcast all about it!

Handling Homework Workload

The first blog of the month took a look at managing stress. With a focus on how teachers can help students, the rule of time-management is ultimately what came out as the most important factor, with things such as eating properly and staying positive also making the list. You can find the full blog here:
How teachers can help to handle homework stress

How to get Students to do their Homework

The second in our series of blogs examined how to get students to complete their homework. While it’s all very well to blame the student for their missed deadlines, it’s sometimes worth remembering that being set up to fail can be in the hands of the teacher. Planned workloads with fair expectations can help motivate a learner into engaging, rather than shutting down when feeling overwhelmed. Combine this with varied and interesting assignments that reinforce the learning done in lessons and you can help students get their work done. The full blog is here:
Getting Homework Done

How to Mark Homework

Finally, the third blog took a look at the research of Dr Rod Ellis and his various models for marking work. The theories he examines explain how you can turn the feedback process into one that also engages with a student’s learning process, and rather than just outlining the correct answers, actually engage them into learning afresh once marking has been handed back. The blog, along with a link to the full lecture, can be found here:
How to Mark Homework

Podcast

Of course if you’d rather not spend time reading these blogs and would like to have them read to you, the inaugural episode of the Webanywhere Podcast is now live, where I go through each of the blogs and discuss what they mean and how you can implement some of the better ideas. Podcast link is below:

That just about wraps it up for Homework month, next month we’ll be examining anti-bullying, and tackling issues around cyber bullying in schools. Until then, thanks for checking out homework month!