How to assign and grade lessons

Teachers can easily assign any type of lesson plan to students including assessments, activities and instructional videos. This article covers:

• Overview video
• Assigning a lesson plan
• Scheduling the assignment
• Sharing the assignment with others or with an LMS
• Other assignment features
• Grading lesson plans
• Moving an assignment to a different class

Overview video

Assigning a lesson plan

Go to the Lesson Plan you wish to assign to students. Click "Assign > + Assign."

If you wish to see how a student would view the assignment, click "Assign > Preview assignment."

Selecting materials to assign

Select the content that you want to assign. If there are materials related to the main content that you are assigning, you can also choose to assign those at the same time.

When you are done, click "Next."

Selecting students

Select the classes or individual students to take the assignment. Click "Create assignments" when you are done.

Accessing the student submissions tab

If you created just one assignment, you will be taken to the "Student submissions" tab in the assignments page.

Here you can open the assignment for students, monitor student submissions, and explore other assignment management capabilities that we will go over in the next slides.

Assigning multiple lessons

If you assigned multiple lessons across different classes, your Class page will open. A “new assignments” banner will appear next to the class names. Click the class of your choice to see the new assignments that you created.

Click the assignment to take you to the ”Student submissions” page.

Opening assignments

By default, assignments are closed for students until the teacher opens them. On the Student submissions tab, you can open the assignment for all students or for individual students. 

• Check the box next to the "Student" header to select all students.
• Check the box next to a student name to select just that student.

Click "Open now" to immediately open the assignment for the selected students.

Alternatively, you can quickly change the status of an assignment for all students directly on your class page.

• On your class page, locate the assignment that you wish to change the status.
• Click the status dropdown and select the appropriate status.

Scheduling the assignment

On your assignment page, click "Schedule assignment" to set up a date and time that you want to open and close the assignment in the future.

The "Schedule assignment" pop-up box will appear. By default, the "Scheduled" option is selected in the "Open date" section.

• With the "Scheduled" option selected, you can use the calendar tool to select the day and time to open the assignment.

Choose the "Open now" option if you would like to immediately open the assignment for students.

Choose the "No date specified" option if you do not want to schedule a specific date to open the assignment. Selecting this option will also reset any previously scheduled dates.

Closing assignments

If you selected the "Scheduled" or "Open now" option within the "Open date" column, you can select the "Scheduled" option in the "Close date column."

You can use the calendar tool to select the day and time to close the assignment. Students will not be able to change their responses once the assignment is closed.

Choose the "No date specified" option if you do not want to schedule a specific date to close the assignment. Selecting this option will also reset any previously scheduled dates.

Scheduling options explanation

Click "What are my options?" for a brief explanation of all the options available for scheduling the assignment.

Saving your selected choices

When you have finished scheduling your assignment, click "Done" to save your selected choices.

Sharing the assignment with others or with an LMS

On your assignment page, click "Assign > Share."

You can share this assignment by copying the LTI URL (see red box in image) when assigning the Lesson Plan inside of Canvas.

When you are done copying, close the sharing window by clicking on the "x" button located on the top right corner.

Other assignment features

Sorting student names

Submissions can be sorted by various columns by simply clicking the column you wish to sort by (First Name, Last Name, Assignment Status, Date or Score).

Accessing the "What students see" tab

Click the "What students see" tab to go to the student view and check how students will view the assignment.

Who viewed this

Click the "Who viewed this" tab to check which students viewed the assignment and when.

Grading lesson plans

Navigating to your classes and assignments

Go to your Classes page, then select the class where the assignment you want to grade lives.

Selecting an assignment to grade

Select the assignment you wish to grade.

You must close the assignment before grading it. Closing the assignment will prevent the student from changing their submissions.

You can also preview the student's responses prior to closing it. The "Preview" button only appears next to students who have attempted the assignment.

Selecting items to grade

Once closed, you can see the automated score. Click the score or on each item to edit the automated grades or to manually grade items.

If there are items that need to be graded manually, you will see the "Grade" button instead of the grade percentage.

Grading items with Quick Score

You can quickly grade questions with Quick Score. Score student work directly from a slide-out panel within the grading dashboard. No more loading and exiting the full grading view for every student.

Select the Quick Score button on the assignment page. The assignment will automatically close when Quick Score is selected and the Quick Score panel will slide out on the screen. Within the panel, you may either:​

• Manually enter the desired point value
• Use the Max or Min buttons to automatically fill in the highest or lowest point values available.

Exploring the Grading View

Upon clicking on the score, you will be taken to the Grading Experience. Some of the important tasks you can do here are:

• grade per student
• grade by item, going through the same item across student profiles
• add assignment and item feedback

Grading by Item

Click the dropdown arrow next to the student's name to view all items across students and classes for your assignment. To grade by item, simply click the item number that you would like to grade next. You can hop between students — even across classes.

You can quickly grade by item switching between students using the arrows next to the student's name. You can also use the keyboard's left and right arrow keys.

Viewing and hiding the scoring guidance

The scoring guidance for each item is displayed on the right side of the page. Here, among other things, you can see the average score for this particular item across all your students that have taken the assignment.

If you don't want to see the scoring guidance, click the double arrowheads to hide it from view.

Classes filter

If the assignment is shared among multiple classes, you will see the "Classes" filter. Click it to filter what classes you want to see in the Grading View. This filter defaults to "All Classes."

Selecting students to grade

Select which students you want to review in the "Reviewing Students" filter. This filter defaults to all students that were assigned the assignment.

"Hiding" filters

To enhance the Grading Experience, you can check a box:

• hide graded items and only review items that still require grading
• hide real student names while grading, replacing them with placeholder names instead
• hide students that still have an assignment status set to "Open" (i.e., assignments where students can still access and change their answers).

Changing the assignment status

You can change the status of the assignment for the selected student directly from the Grading Experience page. Click the dropdown to change the status to:

• Opened
• Closed
• Returned (the student can see their grades and feedback).

Overall feedback and item feedback

You can add overall assignment feedback or item feedback for the selected student. For overall feedback, click the "Comment" button next to the student name.

For item feedback, click the "Comment" button next to the individual item.

Add your comments.

• Select "Comment now" for students to see your comments while they are working on the assignment. 
• Select "Comment when returned" if you want students to see your comments only after you change the assignment status to "return with grade."

If the assignment status is set to "return with grade" and you want to update any comments you've made, click "Update and show now."

Giving feedback with co-teachers

When giving assignment feedback in classes that have multiple teachers, keep the following in mind.

• If a teacher adds overall assignment feedback for a student, the other teachers will not be able to add another overall feedback.
• If a teacher adds feedback to an item for a student, the other teachers will not be able to add feedback to that same item.

Going back to the assignment page

Once you have finished grading, click "Student responses" to take you back to the assignment page.

If you haven't already done so through the Grading Experience, you can choose to return the grade to the student from the assignment page.

Moving an assignment to a different class

When a student is removed from a class, or the class was archived, you may want to move any assignments linked to their old class to their new one.

Open the existing assignment and click "Assign."