Office Of Smith IT
Smith School of Business
Van Munching Hall, Rm 3520
College Park, MD 20742
301-405-2269
helpme@rhsmith.umd.edu
bbhelp@rhsmith.umd.edu
(for Blackboard Requests)

Office Hours
Mon-Fri (9 a.m. - 5 p.m.)

Using Assignment Tool

(for Instructors and TAs)

• Assignment Tool - a Quick Guide (Assignment Tool8-Quick.pdf)
  (Instructions for creating and collecting assignments with screenshots)
• Student Guide about Submitting Assignments
• Naming Issues (for both Instructors and Students)

USING ASSIGNMENT TOOL

The Blackboard Assignment Tool is a very useful tool, it allows instructors to distribute assignments, collect individual student responses, post feedback to students, and grade on the items in Gradebook in a very convenient way.  

Tip1. How to tell if you have created an item using Assignment Tool.

The item created using Assignment Tool has an link >> View/Complete Assignment at the bottom. (If you do not see that link, you've most likely just added a plain 'item'.) Students click on that link to submit their responses. These submissions will be saved in Gradebook directly, and instructor can view them individually and grade them.

Tip2. Download All or Selected student responses for an assignment at one time.

If you prefer, you may 'collect' all the student submissions of an assignment item into a zip file, save it on your local computer and then unzip it whenever you want to look at the submissions. You don't have to be on the internet to unzip it later. The zip file contains not only the documents that students submitted, but also students' submission information and their comments if there's any. 

To do this, go to course Control Panel -> Gradebook -> hit the dropdown arrow of the item, select > Assignment File Download -> Select All or those you want in the list -> Submit and Download.  

*NOTE: Students can only click "Submit" ONCE for each assignment link.

Multiple documents may be attached to that one submission, but once they click submit, no more may be sent to you using this link. So please let them using "Save" button if not ready. If they already submitted and you wish to clear their submission and give them another chance at this assignment, you may. Please provide the student guide (one page document) about submitting assignments to students if you can. 

File Naming Conventions - Important!!   (Naming Files and Gradebook Columns )

When try to upload a Microsoft Word or PowerPoint file as an attachment, make sure your file name does not contains special characters (such as = ! , \ " ' # @ ( ) space), or you may get an error message.

When you create columns in the Gradebook or ask students to submit digital Assignments, file naming convention is also important to note. Warn your students about it, and don't use them in your Gradebook Column names, to avoid the potential problem.