School’s VLE of choice takes the form of Moodle. I have been looking at setting homework through it, particularly for my year 10s, who I think are finding the jump in the amount of HW they get this year quite difficult to cope with.

Students across all year groups are set their ICT work through Moodle so they are alrady familiar with how to use it. This week I set them a research task as an online assignment. It looked like this:

Students were able to click on the assignment and type their text into the box provided, and then hit submit. I then marked the assignment online (some before the lesson, some in the lesson while the students worked on an assessment task) and provided individual feedback.

Here’s how I did it:
1. With editing turned on, select “Assignment – online text” from the “Add an activity” dropdown menu
2. Give the assignment a name and add a description. I liked this bit because it meant that the students didn’t have to write down all the instructions in their planners, since they are on the VLE.
3. Choose a grading scale. I made mine out of 10. You can choose to have no grading scale.
4. Choose the dates the HW is available for. This would allow you to schedule homeworks ahead of time. You can also choose whether to allow HW to be resubmitted – after you’ve marked it, for example – and whether you get an email alert every time an assignment is submitted.
5. Click “Save and return to course”. The assignment should now appear on your Course page.

When you’re ready to mark the assignment, click on the link to it from the course and click “View .. submitted assignments” in the top right hand corner. There is an option to grade each piece, and you can also add feedback here.

There are dozens of helpful Moodle tutorials out there. I like to use these.