Assignment Dropbox - Overview

Overview of Assignment Dropbox

The Assignment Dropbox tool allows you to distribute course assignments to your students. This tool also allows your students to submit completed assignments. Click the links below to view the section of the help on either the designer or student view.

• Designer View of Assignment Dropbox
• Student View of Assignment Dropbox

Among the features of this WebCT tool are an instruction box in which you describe the assignment, a maximum grade box with which you can inform students of an assignment's value, and a utility that lets you attach files that are related to your assignment. For example, these files can be photographs, a spreadsheet you want the student to modify, or articles to which you want students to respond. The first section of this online help discusses those aspects of the Assignment Dropbox tool used by you, the instructor. The second part discusses those aspects of the tool used by students.

To add the Assignment Dropbox tool to your course homepage, click Organize Icons on the designer toolbar Add WebCT tool. Next, select the radio button below the Assignment Dropbox icon, type in a name for the icon (optional), and click Add.

The Designer View of Assignment Dropbox | Top

When you click the Assignment Dropbox icon on your homepage, the following screen appears (see Figure 1). If you have not yet added any assignments, the screen is blank. Once you have added assignments, however, you can delete, or change the order of assignments using the buttons on the Dropbox toolbar.

Click Add Assignment to open the Create New Assignment screen shown in Figure 2.

Type the title of the new assignment in the text box provided and click Add. The Assignment Dropbox screen will appear. This screen now lists the new topic as a hyperlink (see Figure 3 below). This hyperlink is connected to your assignment.

Once an assignment has been added, you may want to delete it. To do so, select the radio button to its left and click Delete Assignment on the Dropbox toolbar shown in Figure 1.

Clicking the hyperlinked assignment title ("Vector Review") opens the Assignment Editor (see Figure 4 below). This screen displays the due date for the assignment, instructions for the completion of the assignment, and its maximum grade. These three assignment attributes are set by you in the Assignment Settings screen, which is discussed in detail below. The Assignment Editor also lists assignment-related files. The Dropbox toolbar at the bottom of the Assignment Editor screen contains three buttons: Import File, Remove File(s), and Settings.

Import File allows you to upload assignment-related files. When you click Import File, the following screen appears (see Figure 5). Click Browse and select the file, which you have previously created and uploaded to your [COURSE FILES]directory, that you want to import. When you have done so, click Continue to add the new assignment-related file and return to the Assignment Editor.

The Assignment Editor will now display the newly imported assignment-related files, as seen in Figure 6.

The Remove File(s) feature gives you the ability to remove an assignment-related file. To do so, select the check box to the left of the file and click Remove File(s) on the Dropbox toolbar.

Click Settings on the Dropbox toolbar to open the Assignment Settings screen, which is shown in Figure 7 below. This screen is divided into three sections: the Basic Settings area, the Availability area, and the Notification area.

• The Basic Settings area allows you to title the assignment, give instructions about the assignment to your students, and inform them of the maximum grade possible.
• The Availability area allows you to set the date and time at which you want the assignment to be available, as well as the date and time you want to cut off access to the assignment. The Available Until setting determines the due date that is displayed in the Assignment Editor.
• The Notification area allows you to choose whether or not WebCT will send a message of acknowledgement to each student when they submit an assignment. A second aspect of the Notification feature, which you can turn on and off, is its ability to send you an e-mail message when a student submits an assignment.

Once you have finished typing the information in the Assignment Settings screen, press Update to save, or Cancel to return to the Assignment Editor.

Grading Student Assignments | Top

When you are ready to review assignments which your students have submitted, click Submissions in the Assignment Dropbox screen (see Figure 3 ). The Submissions screen will appear and the Status column will contain a hyperlink to the ungraded assignment, as in Figure 8 below.

Clicking the hyperlink in the Status column will open a new screen which displays information about the submitted assignment. This screen also contains links to files the student has submitted, a text-entry box in which to type the grade for the assignment, as well as another text-entry box in which you can type your comments on the assignment itself (see Figure 9 below).

Click on the hyperlinked student file to open it. You need to have the software with which the assignment was created in order to view it. If you do not have this you need a program that can convert the file to a format you can use. Word processing programs made by different software companies can convert files created using their competitor's product.

After reviewing the assignment, enter a grade in the Grade text-entry box, and type your comments about the assignment in the text box provided. Click Grade at the bottom of the screen to complete this task and return to the Submissions page.

The Student View of Assignment Dropbox | Top

Your student's view of the Assignment Dropbox tool varies from the course designer view in a number of ways. For example, students must upload completed assignment files in order to submit them by navigating through a series of screens that you, as a course designer, do not see.

To upload completed assignments, students start by clicking the Assignment Dropbox icon on their homepage. Their next step is to click the hyperlinked name of the assignment they want to submit on the Assignment Dropbox screen. The Assignment Dropbox heading at the top of the subsequent screen will display the title of the assignment that they want to submit, as in Figure 10 below.

Before students can actually submit an assignment, they must choose which file to upload. A student accomplishes this by clicking Student Files... Upload, and selecting the file that they want to upload by clicking Browse. Once the appropriate file has been located, the student clicks Continue to return to the View/Upload Files for Dropbox screen (see Figure 11, below). The selected file is now listed in the Student Files list. Selecting the check box next to a student file and clicking Delete will remove it.

Note: Students use their own software applications to complete assignments. When naming an assignment file which they intend to upload, students can only use single-word file names. Furthermore, they can only use lowercase letters for their assignment file names. WebCT will not recognize file names with spaces or uppercase letters.

To finish the upload process, students click Back in the View/Upload Files for Dropbox screen Submit Assignment. The Submit Assignment Dropbox screen appears. This screen contains a text-entry box in which students type their e-mail address. This allows WebCT to notify a student when their assignment has been submitted successfully (see Figure 12 below). If you have not activated the e-mail notification feature of WebCT in the Assignment Settings screen (see Figure 7 ), the text-entry box will not appear.

Once an e-mail address has been entered, the student clicks Submit Assignment. A confirmation box appears asking the student to confirm the procedure. If the student clicks OK, the Assignment Dropbox screen appears. Students can click Home on this screen to return to their homepage.

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