Create Assignments in Microsoft Teams

Assignments are one of the features that sets Class Teams apart from other types of Teams in Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams was designed for remote work and remote learning, so it is ideally suited for today’s educational landscape, not retrofitted to work for remote learning like most other platforms. Day 114 of 365 Ideas for Microsoft 365 will highlight Assignments in Teams.

Assignments Tab

There are a couple places you can create an assignment. I’m going to use the Assignments tab.

Under the Assignments tab you can see assignments divided into drafts, assigned and returned. You can also select the “Create” button to start a new assignment or reuse an existing one.

Quizzes

If you choose “Quiz”, you will see existing Microsoft Forms in chronological order of when you created them. You may also choose to create a brand new quiz from here. Selecting a new quiz will open Microsoft Forms in a browser. Once you create it, return to Teams and select the new quiz. Notice there is also a search box in case you are looking for an older assessment.

Existing Assignments

If you instead choose an existing assignment to reuse, Teams prompts you to select which class to select the assignment from. Select the assignment, to reuse, and the editing screen will appear so you can specify dates and customize the assignment. More on that below.

Create New Assignments

This option takes you right into the editing screen to begin building.

Title and Tags

Start with a descriptive title. You want your students (and parents, and yourself) to be able to easily identify and locate the assignment, so try to avoid “HW- 10/13”.

Just because it doesn’t get a field, don’t think of tags/categories as optional. Give every assignment a tag. Consider categories like classwork and homework, quiz and warm-up, but also go deeper with lab, journal, free write, essay, group work, etc.

Instructions

Like most textboxes in Teams, “Instructions” offer some rich formatting options, including pasting a screenshot into the instructions field! Consider adding brief directions here, and also putting detailed instructions as an added resource (attachment).

Resources/Attachments

There are so many choices for adding attachments.

Choose from your own OneDrive, from a OneNote Class Notebook, any web link/url, or create a new file. That can be a Word document, PowerPoint presentation, Excel Spreadsheet or a new page in a OneNote Class Notebook. You can also add an attachment by uploading from your device. Finally, you can add a file from Teams. Teams assumes that you will most often want to add a file that is already saved in the Files area of this team, but you can select any Team you area  member of, and select any channel to choose a file to add to your assignment.

Distribute copies

By default, students can’t edit the document. But you can select “Students can edit their own copy” to distribute a copy to each student.

(Unlike Google Classroom, you can come back later and change to students can edit their own copy.)

In fact, when you come back to this assignment later and click on the ellipses next to any resource, you get more options for what you can do with those files.

There’s a lot to assignments in Teams, so check back tomorrow for additional features and settings!

You can also learn more here.