Organise and Schedule Assignments

Hi, it’s Jacob here, and in this short video we’re going to have a little explore of some of the ways we can manage and organise assignments in Magma Maths.

To begin with, I’m just creating a normal assignment. We’re looking at some lines of symmetry this time, if you’re interested, and we’re going to create this assignment just like we normally would. But actually, rather than publishing it and sharing it with my students straight away, I’m going to change the option here to be unpublished instead. Then, I’ll press Create like normal.

This gives us a quick insight into how assignments are organised in Magma. They can be unpublished, they can be available, or they can be archived.

If an assignment is unpublished, that means it’s ready to go — you’ve prepped it before the lesson, but the students can’t see or work with it yet. If it’s available, simple — it’s available to your students, they can work on it, and they can complete that learning. And if it’s archived, that’s where you’ve put historical data — assignments that have finished but you want to hang on to for the future.

If we look at the Unpublished section to begin with, we don’t just have to have assignments there ready to go that we then trigger when we’re ready. We can actually schedule them ahead of time, which means they can automatically appear for your students at the start of a lesson — meaning you’re never going to forget to do it.

So, I’m going to change my current assignment to make it a scheduled one instead. I’m going to do that by tapping the three dots and then pressing Edit. From here, I go back to that same assignment builder screen I had earlier, and I can change it from being unpublished to instead being scheduled.

It’s worth knowing that you can choose Scheduled as you’re creating an assignment — you don’t have to come out of it and go back in like I’ve just done. I’ve very much taken the scenic route there!

When we choose to schedule the assignment, we can choose a start time and also an end time. Of course, it will automatically appear and then disappear on student accounts at those specified times.

Then, when I press Create and go back to my homepage, I can see it’s there as an unpublished assignment, but now there’s a time on it for when it’s going to go live.

There are also lots of other things we can do with those little three dots next to our assignment. For example, if I tap on it again now, we have the option to print it — if you wanted to do a physical version for some students. But I’m actually going to press Copy for now, and that’s going to make an exact clone of that assignment.

Earlier, when I first did this, I selected four students for that version. But now, when I’m editing this copied assignment, I can choose some different questions and assign them to different students. Then, when I’ve selected the questions and my new group of students, I can also rename the assignment.

I like to keep the assignment names the same so children don’t perhaps realise there are different versions being sent out to different groups — but you can choose whatever name you want for the assignments you’re creating.

Now, back on that assignment homepage, we’re going to have a look at how we can share this with a colleague, simply by pressing the three dots and then tapping — you guessed it — Share with colleague.

Doing this will actually make your assignment available to everyone else in your organisation, and it will appear in a Shared Assignments book when you’re creating that new assignment. Tapping on that book will let you choose the teacher who’s shared it and then any assignments that have been shared by that colleague.

It’s a really good way of working across year groups and phases to make sure you’re not repeating work that someone’s already done.

There’s one last thing I want to show you here, which I find really, really powerful — and we’re going to jump onto the Active Assignments tab to do that.

Here is the assignment that we’re currently working on as a class. If I tap on the three dots, I can then choose Solve, and what this will do is give me a version of the assignment on my iPad, just like the students have. Of course, I can then AirPlay this to my screen and solve it, modelling how I’m working through it with my class.

And that’s a really quick look at how we can organise, share, edit, schedule, publish, unpublish, and solve assignments using Magma Maths.

If you want to learn more about Magma Maths, you can check out the whole series of videos we’re creating together, which will take you from being a novice to a Magma Maths master in no time at all.

I’ll see you next time.