Creating an Assignment in Teams

This tutorial is aimed at teachers and/or students using Microsoft Teams for the first time. Make your first Assignment easy and fun. Over-committing and over-complicating matters at this stage will damage you and your students’ confidence! I always complete one or two assignments in class as a training exercise.

1. First assignment ideas

1.1 Question

Simply ask a question to engage your students and ask them to offer an opinion in the comments to the Assignment.

1.2 Screenshot

Providing evidence of work is a critical part of working in Teams and screenshotting is an essential skill for this purpose. Set a research task where students must find an online resource, screenshot it, and hand the screenshot in as evidence.

Include a link to the following tutorial to teach your students this essential skill: Windows Snip & Sketch.

2. Create your first Assignment

Select the Assignments tab and click the New assignment button:

1. Enter a name in the Enter title textbox
2. Enter the details and/or instructions in the Enter instructions text area
3. Click the Edit assignment timeline link (see 2.1 below)
4. The Team currently active will already be selected. Select additional Teams if needed
5. Leave on the default, All current students
6. Select a module if you chose to set modules up before creating assignments
7. Optional: Click Add rubric (see the tutorial Adding a rubric to a Microsoft Teams Assignment)
8. Add a number of points (see the post Monitoring work in Microsoft Teams)
9. Optional: Add tags
10. Click on Attach
    1. Click on the Link option
    2. Paste this URL: https://www.stylus.co.za/windows-snip-sketch/
11. Select Assign if you are ready for the Assignment to be visible in the Team or if you have set it as Scheduled
12. Save as Draft if you are not ready to assign or schedule the task.

2.1 Edit assignment timeline

1. The Edit assignment timeline dialog allows you to fine-tune
2. Activate the optional Schedule date
3. Schedule the date and time that the assignment should become available to the students
4. Set the Due date and time
5. Activate the optional Close date
6. Schedule the date and time that the assignment should become closed (unavailable) to the students
7. Click Done on completion

3. Next steps

• See Monitoring work in Microsoft Teams to learn about marking strategies
• Arrange your assets and assignments by Setting up the Classwork tab in Teams
• Get fancy and Create a custom Homepage for your Class.