For educators juggling teaching and administrative tasks, every minute is precious. Microsoft Teams offers a practical feature to streamline your workload: the ability to import assignment settings from one class to another.
Picture this: You’re setting up your digital classroom in Teams for the new academic term. The structure of your assignments largely mirrors those of the previous term or another class – the same guidelines, submission deadlines, and even notification settings. Rather than duplicating efforts by setting up each assignment from scratch, Microsoft Teams allows you to seamlessly import these settings, ensuring consistency and saving you a substantial amount of time. This function is not just a shortcut; it’s a strategic tool to enhance your focus on what truly matters – your students and their learning experiences.
In this blog post, we’ll walk through the simple steps to use this feature. Whether you’re tech-savvy or just getting comfortable with digital classroom management, this guide is designed to help you streamline your workflow, leaving you with more time to focus on creating impactful learning journeys for your students.
Find assignment settings
First, find an assignment that has the settings you’d like to copy. Simply:
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Select Teams.
Choose a Team.
3. Open up Assignments.
4. Hit the Assignment Settings Cog in the top-right corner of the window.
This displays your current assignment settings. These include:
- Assignment Timeline – Set assignments for future dates.
- Calendar – Add future assignments to calendars.
- Notifications – Receive notifications (e.g. if a student hands in a piece of work late).
- Parent/Guardian Email – Send a weekly email about assignments to parents/guardians.
- New Students – Allow new students to receive assignments created before they joined the class.
- Fun Stuff – Enable turn in celebrations for this team.
You can also view Grade Settings on this page, including:
- Average Grade – Allow students to view their average grade and trend over time in the Grades tab.
- Weighted Grading Categories – Establish assignment types and assign weights to reflect their importance.
Import assignment settings
To import the settings from your chosen assignment:
1. Select Import Settings From Another Class.
2. Scroll down the list of classes and select the Class you’d like to import the settings from.
3. Hit Next.
You can also import settings from a previous year’s class. Just scroll down until you find the relevant class.
The next box will give you a breakdown of the assignment settings that will be imported, including:
- Assignment Timeline
- Calendar
- Notifications
- Parent/guardian email
- New students
- Fun stuff
4. Tap Import Settings.
Now, the settings will be imported into the current assignment. Don’t forget to import the settings for all your other classes that have identical assignment settings!
Conclusion
Import assignment settings allows you to easily copy the assignment settings without having to manually set up all of your individual assignments’ settings. This can save teachers a lot of time as educators often find themselves setting up new assignments time and time again. As this is such a frequent task for educators, streamlining this process can seriously save a lot of time in the long-run, allowing teachers to spend more time focussing on creating effective teaching materials and lesson plans instead of administrative tasks in Teams.
Contact Cloud Design Box to find out how we can help you supercharge Microsoft Teams for education.
