Assignment Central
Students are taught from an early age how to write down their assignments in their Planners or Assignment Notebooks in class. This is a great way for them to acknowledge work to be done and to assume responsibility for their assignments. The physical act of writing it down, for many, makes the assignment more of a psychological reality. Students who admit that they don't write them down -- as their classmates are busily popping out their assignment notebooks and scribbling -- say they "rely on their memory" but often their grades show they are deceiving themselves that they can retain the details and due dates of the daily variety of assignments from all their classes. For these reasons, few educators and coaches would minimize the effectiveness of using the time-honored Assignment Notebook.
Lucy Lockwood, a colleague of mine, has had success with the "Homework Binder" method. It is a great way to help students track their assignments, and she is happy to share it. See the .pdf file at the bottom. The Homework Binder is what goes back and forth to and from school each day, while other subject binders stay at school. The Homework Binder is specifically for keeping track of homework and papers directly associated with it. Other Binders go to specific classes, but the Homework Binder goes to every class, including Homeroom.
When homework sheets or assignment rubrics are given out in class, students -- before leaving class -- need to put them in the "binder pocket" that is color-coded and labeled for that class. It's essential to take the extra ten seconds to find its specific binder pocket. Any extra information about an assignment that is handwritten also gets put in that binder pocket. This includes the frequent permission forms, etc. that are disseminated in Homeroom and need to be returned promptly. Those are put in the clear pocket in the front. Nothing else is to go in the clear pocket. Completed assignments and writings done at home are likewise put in the binder pocket and are found quickly in class.
This approach takes a bit of practice, but students find that they spend less time looking for assignments in class or for papers that are due. Papers no longer needed are weeded out and filed at home on a weekly basis (or in school if the teacher has a dedicated classroom binder). The Homework Binder is to be used along with the Assignment Notebook. This is Assignment Central on paper. With daily attention and some weekly weeding and filing, it works.
That's the physical side of staying organized. Now for the online version of Assignment Central. The availability of having assignments described online is clearly helpful and is here to stay. Many teachers are putting their assignments online these days, and students, parents, coaches, and tutors, even other teachers, find it helpful to visit teachers' webpages to know what is expected. People young and old are quite capable of writing things down incompletely and imprecisely. Students with dysgraphia may have the best of intentions and still not get it down in legible form. Also, many assignments in these days of "Web 2.0" have an online component and writing down lengthy web addresses is not a great plan. Clicking on or pasting a link from an online assignment page is the best way to insure students will not waste time and will arrive at a specific website.
Yet having to visit six different webpages to check in for these daily updates is not so great. If only they could be centralized so that a student would have them all on one page. In middle school, the teaming approach sometimes leads to this for the on-team subjects, but there are off-team courses, too. Some districts use the services of websites such as TeacherWeb to group teacher webpages under the same umbrella.
Let's see how Google Calendars can help us out. Imagine your student has the following schedule, and you want to increase his or her tracking skills on assignments. Below this spreadsheet is a Google Calendar, with the same schedule. I'll explain how to set up Google Calendars below.
To see how this could be used, go to the Agenda view and find the second week of September, especially Monday, September 13, 2010.
Getting to know Google Calendar takes a bit of investment in time, but after some exploration and trial and error it becomes pretty clear. (If you have a [free] Gmail or Google Account, the Calendar function comes with it.) The first step is to set up a student's schedule, and the student should be a part of this process. Each different subject needs a separate calendar, which allows for color coding for visual differentiation. It's easy to include another calendar (such as have been made for these different courses) or to select a different color in the "My Calendars" area on the left.
When setting up a class meeting time, select the repeat function to repeat it weekly, ending in June, even for semester or trimester courses. (A new course name can easily be substituted in there. Part of the value of the calendar view is to be able to visualize the sequence of one's courses on a given date.) Specific assignments are added but only to this present date, not to all the following dates in the series.
The benefit of exploring the use of Google Calendars in this way is that it could be possible to track all of your assignments in one place. Students who have laptops at school and wireless internet in the classroom can add assignment descriptions during class. Teachers who are willing to commit to Google Calendar can disseminate assignments this way, as long as your email is added in their Share menu. Coaches and parents who have been invited through their email addresses can check in easily, too, although if they already use Google Calendars, they might want a new email address specifically for this, or their Google calendar might get overloaded.
Toggling between the Week and the (Daily) Agenda views is helpful. The agenda view allows all assignments for a day to be seen at once! Welcome to Assignment Central. This way of managing and tracking assignments deserves further exploration. -- John Chamberlain