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Easily distribute, analyze, and grade student work with assignments for your lms.

Assignments is an application for your learning management system (LMS). It helps educators save time grading and guides students to turn in their best work with originality reports — all through the collaborative power of Google Workspace for Education.

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Bring your favorite tools together within your LMS

Make Google Docs and Google Drive compatible with your LMS

Simplify assignment management with user-friendly Google Workspace productivity tools

Built with the latest Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standards for robust security and easy installation in your LMS

Save time distributing and grading classwork

Distribute personalized copies of Google Drive templates and worksheets to students

Grade consistently and transparently with rubrics integrated into student work

Add rich feedback faster using the customizable comment bank

Examine student work to ensure authenticity

Compare student work against hundreds of billions of web pages and over 40 million books with originality reports

Make student-to-student comparisons on your domain-owned repository of past submissions when you sign up for the Teaching and Learning Upgrade or Google Workspace for Education Plus

Allow students to scan their own work for recommended citations up to three times

Trust in high security standards

Protect student privacy — data is owned and managed solely by you and your students

Provide an ad-free experience for all your users

Compatible with LTI version 1.1 or higher and meets rigorous compliance standards

Product demos

Experience google workspace for education in action. explore premium features in detail via step-by-step demos to get a feel for how they work in the classroom..

“Assignments enable faculty to save time on the mundane parts of grading and...spend more time on providing more personalized and relevant feedback to students.” Benjamin Hommerding , Technology Innovationist, St. Norbert College

Classroom users get the best of Assignments built-in

Find all of the same features of Assignments in your existing Classroom environment

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Explore resources to get up and running

Discover helpful resources to get up to speed on using Assignments and find answers to commonly asked questions.

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Get a quick overview of Assignments to help Educators learn how they can use it in their classrooms.

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Get started guide

Start using Assignments in your courses with this step-by-step guide for instructors.

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Teacher Center Assignments resources

Find educator tools and resources to get started with Assignments.

• Visit Teacher Center

How to use Assignments within your LMS

Watch this brief video on how Educators can use Assignments.

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Turn on Assignments in your LMS

Contact your institution’s administrator to turn on Assignments within your LMS.

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Getting started with assignments.

Learn how to use Assignments to easily distribute, analyze, and grade student work – all while using the collaborative power of Google Workspace.

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Get the most out of Assignments with these simple tips from fellow teachers and educators.

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Dive into Assignments

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Google Assignments, your new grading companion

Aug 14, 2019

[[read-time]] min read

Instructors lose valuable time doing cumbersome tasks: writing the same comment on multiple essays, returning piles of paper assignments, and battling copy machine jams. These frustrations are most often felt by instructors with the highest teaching workloads and the least time. For the last five years, we’ve been building tools—like Classroom and Quizzes in Google Forms—to address these challenges. Now you can take advantage of these tools if you use a traditional Learning Management System (LMS). 

Assignments brings together the capabilities of Google Docs, Drive and Search into a new tool for collecting and grading student work. It helps you save time with streamlined assignment workflows, ensure student work is authentic with originality reports, and give constructive feedback with comment banks. You can use Assignments as a standalone tool and a companion to your LMS (no setup required!) or your school admin can integrate it with your LMS. Sign up today to try Assignments.

If you're one of the 40 million people using Classroom: you've got the best of Assignments already baked in, including our new originality reports . For everyone else, Assignments gives you access to these features as a compliment to your school’s LMS. 

Assignments is your tireless grading companion

Using an LMS can create more work than it saves: students turn in all kinds of files, you have to download and re-upload student files one-by-one, and what if students can keep editing after they already turned in their work? Assignments handles all this for you.

Assignments streamlines the creation and management of coursework, and tackles some of your biggest frustrations:

Stop typing the same feedback over and over by using a comment bank, and never worry about pressing the “save” button again

Check student work for originality and automatically lock work once it’s turned in

Assign files with the option to send each student a copy (no more copy machines!)

Grade assignments for an entire class with a student switcher and rubrics, and review any file type without leaving your grading interface

Comment and leave suggestions on student work with Google Docs

Instructors and students can attach anything to assignments: Docs or Word files for papers, spreadsheets for data analysis, slides for presentations, sites for digital portfolios or final projects, Colab notebooks for programming exercises, and much more. 

Help students turn in their best work with originality reports

With originality reports in Assignments, you can check student work for missed citations and possible plagiarism without interrupting your grading workflow. When students turn in a document, Assignments will check students’ text against hundreds of billions of web pages and tens of millions of books. 

If you enable originality reports on an assignment, students can also check their work for authenticity (a limited number of times) to correct issues, turn in their best work, and save instructors time grading. Since both you and your students can see originality reports, they’re designed to help you teach your students about authenticity and academic integrity. 

Getting started with Assignments

Starting today, you can sign up to get access to Assignments when it becomes available in a few weeks. Assignments will be available for free as part of G Suite for Education and can be used by instructors alongside or integrated with an LMS. 

Instructors can use Assignments even if your school has an LMS. There’s no setup required, all you need is to sign up and have a school-issued Google account. 

Admins can turn on access to Assignments within your LMS. Assignments is available as an LTI tool, which provides a more integrated experience and enables roster syncing and grade transmission to your LMS gradebook. Assignments is an improved and expanded version of Course Kit, so if you’re already in the Course Kit beta, you’ll automatically have access to Assignments. 

If you use Canvas, we’ve worked with their team to complement the Assignments LTI tool with a set of additional features that make Docs and Drive work seamlessly across all Canvas assignments. 

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• Students: Submit assignments

Start, revise & submit assignments

To start your assignment, you first need to link your Google Account to Assignments. You can then open your assignment and, when you are finished, submit it for grading. If you edit your work before the due date, you can resubmit your assignment.

You can attach any file type from Google Drive or your hard drive to your assignment, including:

• Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides
• Microsoft ®️ Word ®️ , Excel ®️ , or PowerPoint ®️
• Image files
• Video files (WEBM, MPEG4, 3GPP, MOV, AVI, MPEG-PS, WMV, FLV, OGG)

Assignments automatically converts Microsoft Office ®️ files to Google Docs, then saves the files to the Assignments folder in your Google Drive.

Complete an assignment

Link your google account to assignments for the course.

The first time you use Google Assignments in a course, you link the Google Account you want to use with that course with your LMS account. 

Linking your Google Account to Assignments allows it to:

• Access your Google Drive to attach files to your assignments.
• Archive copies of your submissions.
• Create an Assignments folder in your Drive that organizes files by course and assignment.

To link your account:

• Go to your LMS.
• Open the assignment.
• Sign in with your Google Account.
• If it's your first time using Assignments for the course, link your Google Account to the course.  

Attach files to an assignment

Important: If your assignment is set up to grade with your LMS’s grader tool, there’s a 10 MB size limit per file.

You can attach up to 20 files to your assignment. 

• To upload a new file, click Create and select a file type.

Turn in an assignment

• When you turn in an assignment, a copy is saved to your Google Drive in the Assignments folder.
• Ownership of your original file transfers to your instructor when it is graded and you can't edit your file.
• You regain ownership of your file when your instructor returns your work.
• You will never lose ownership of your files.
• Work that has been submitted to the instructor is not unsubmitted.
• The instructor sees a time stamp of the most recent submission.

After your instructor grades and returns your work, you regain ownership of your file. 

Note : If you resubmit files, the instructor sees a time stamp of the most recent submission.

Unsubmit an assignment

Important:  This only applies to assignments graded with Google Assignments.

If your assignment has a due date, you can unsubmit your work before the due date. Be sure to resubmit your work before the due date, so it’s not marked late. After the due date, you can’t unsubmit your work. 

If your assignment doesn’t have a due date, you can unsubmit your work at any time. Be sure to check with your instructor for specific requirements.

• Open your assignment.

Need more help?

Try these next steps:.

Google Assignments

Save time grading. Provide feedback that counts. Quickly and securely create, analyze, and grade coursework, while helping students learn more effectively.

• Create, grade, and analyze coursework directly within Canvas
• Let students access Assignments and submit work via Canvas
• Automatically sync grades to your Canvas gradebook

Create and share coursework with ease

Generate new assignments using Docs and Drive, and provide each student with a unique copy. Using the Canvas integration with Google Assignments the sharing and ownership of these documents happens automatically.

Help students develop authentic work

Generate originality reports using the power of Search. Assignments scans student submissions for matching text on the web, right in your grading interface. And students can run their own reports before submitting to help cite and strengthen their work.

Simplify grading and provide rich feedback - all in one place

Pull up frequently used feedback from your comment bank when engaging students with in-line edits and two-way commenting. You can also apply rubrics to keep grading transparent. Assignments makes it easy and secure to accept Docs and Drive files by automatically adjusting permissions to prevent student editing during grading.

Provide students with tools that support active learning

Google Assignments provides capabilities that can help students improve their writing skills, work more efficiently and turn in stronger assignments.

• Originality reports
• Always-visible word count
• Spellcheck and grammar suggestions
• Two-way commenting
• Version Control

Create assignments in Canvas with Google Assignments

• Go to your Canvas course.
• Click Assignments, create an assignment.
• Enter a name and description for your assignment.
• (Optional) Enter a point value and due date.
• Under Submission Type , select External Tool click Find .
• Select Google Assignments .
• Deselect Load This Tool In A New Tab .
• Click Publish .

Note : If this is the first time you're using Google Assignments in Canvas, you must link your Canvas account to your Google Account.

Linking Your Google Assignments Account with Your Canvas Account

The first time you use Google Assignments, you sign in with your F&M Google Account. Linking your account allows Google Assignments to create a folder in your Google Drive for student assignments and to send grades to Canvas.

You only have to link your Google Account once per course, while creating your first assignment. Students can't submit classwork until this step is completed.

Note : In Google Assignments, you can link only to your F&M Google account.

• Open the first assignment you created for the course.
• Click Sign In and sign in to your F&M Google account.
• To link Canvas to your Google Account, click Link Account .
• To link the course to your Google Account, click Link Account .
• If you're signed in to multiple accounts and need to switch between Google Accounts, click Switch Account , or sign in to your F&M Google account.

Attach template files to an assignment

You can attach files to as assignment so each student receives an individual copy to edit and turn in.

Example attachments include:

• Google Docs or Microsoft Word files for paper prompts
• PDFs for worksheets
• Sheets for data analysis
• Slides for presentations
• Sites for digital portfolios or final project templates
• Colab notebooks for programming exercises
• In Canvas, select your course and create an assignment.
• Click Google Assignments , which will open a popup window
• If this is your first time using Google Assignments in the course, confirm your Google Account.
• Select Create assignment .
• Under Title , enter a name for the assignment.
• Under Files , click Attach and select files.
• Click Create . The Assignments window will close.
• Click Select to finish selecting the external tool.

Create or reuse a rubric for an assignment

In Google Assignments, you can create, reuse, view, and grade rubrics for individual assignments. You can give feedback with scored or unscored rubrics. If you use scored rubrics, students see their score when you return their work.

• Within your Canvas course assignment...→ click Open in Assignments.
• Next to No rubric , click Add rubric Create rubric .
• To turn off scoring for the rubric, next to Use scoring , click Turn off .
• (Optional) If you turned on scoring, next to Sort the order of points by , select how to view the criteria, either descending or ascending in value.
• Note : You can enter levels in any order, and rubrics automatically sorts the levels by value.
• Under Criterion , enter your first criterion. For example, enter Grammar , Teamwork , or Citations .
• (Optional) To add a criterion description, click More Add criterion description enter the description.
• Under Points , enter the number of points awarded for the performance level.
• Note : The rubric's total score automatically updates as you add points.
• Under Level , enter a level of performance. For example, enter Excellent , Full mastery , or Level B .
• Under Description , enter the performance expectations.
• To add another performance level to the criterion, click Add a level and repeat steps 8–9.
• To add a blank criterion, in the bottom-left corner, click Add a criterion and repeat steps 6–11.
• To copy a criterion, in the bottom-right corner, click Duplicate criterion and repeat steps 6–11.
• To rearrange criteria, in a criterion’s box, click More select Move criterion up or Move criterion down .
• To save your rubric, in the bottom-right corner, click Save .

→ More information on Rubrics.

Turn on Originality reports

You and your students can check work for unoriginal content with Originality reports. This tool uses Google Search to compare students' Google Docs against billions of webpages and millions of books. Originality reports then displays links to the detected webpages and flags uncited text.

The reports can:

• Help students identify unintentional plagiarism and uncited content before submitting assignments.
• Help instructors see where students used source material and if they properly documented their sources.

When you turn on Originality reports for an assignment, students can run 3 reports per assignment before submitting their work. You can’t see the reports students run. After students run their last report, they can continue to improve their work before submitting the assignment.

After the student turns in their work, Google Assignments automatically runs an originality report for each submitted Docs file, visible only to you. If a student unsubmits and resubmits an assignment, Assignments runs another originality report.

Originality reports are viewable for 45 days. After that, you can run another report by opening the student's submission from within the Assignments grading tool.

To learn how an originality report analyzes work, go to How an originality report is created .

Note : The Originality report is available only for Google Docs in English. If a student uploads a Microsoft Word file, Google Assignments and automatically convert it to a Google Doc and a copy of the original Word file is included in the submission.

Turn on Originality reports within Canvas

• Create/edit an assignment in Canvas → click Open in Assignments .
• Next to Originality reports , check the box.

Open an Originality report

• Click the course.
• Click the assignment → Open in Assignments → the student's document.
• The file opens in the grading tool.
• To view the report, under Files , click # of flagged passages .

How instructors and students share files

When you create an assignment, you can attach files such as Google Docs, PDFs, or other materials for students to work on.

For example, you might include:

• A Docs essay assignment
• A PDF worksheet
• A reference image

After you publish the assignment, students work on the files and can add their own materials. When students turn in their work, you can review and grade their work and files.

As you exchange files with students, Google Assignments automatically transfers ownership and updates file permissions to View only or Edit access. When you receive student work, edit access transfers to you. When you return the work, edit access transfers to the student.

Workflow in Action

• Result : Copies of attached files are made for each student. File ownership transfers to the student. Instructors can't view or edit the files.
• Result : File ownership temporarily transfers to the instructor. Student can’t edit or view their files.
• Result : File ownership transfers back to the student, and the student's editing rights are restored.
• Optional : Student can edit and resubmit assignment.

→ More information on sharing files in Google Assignments

Student Google Assignment Resources