Getting your classroom set up
Setting up Deskpad Learn takes only a few minutes and works without any help from your IT department. This guide walks through the whole path, from creating your account to grading your first assignment, so you know what to expect before your students ever log in.
Setting up your class
Once you have created your teacher account, you make a class for each section you teach and give it a name you will recognize. Each class comes with a join code that you share with your students, and they use it to add themselves to the right class when they sign in. From that point on, every assignment you create for the class reaches exactly the students who should see it.
Creating your first assignment
Creating an assignment starts with a title and a prompt, and you can set a due date if the work has one. You then choose where students will write, either in the Deskpad Learn editor or directly in their own Google Docs, depending on how your class already works. A few optional settings let you shape it further: you can set how many times a student is able to message Sage, turn off pasting for work done in the Deskpad Learn editor, and decide how many points the assignment is worth if you plan to grade it on a scale. Once it is ready, you share it with the class and your students can begin.
Reviewing and grading
When a student submits, their work moves into your review workspace, where their writing sits alongside their full Sage transcript. You can read the final piece and look back through every conversation they had with Sage before you decide on a grade. You leave a grade and written feedback in the same place, and your students see both as soon as you are done.
If your class lives in Google Docs
If your students do most of their writing in Google Docs, you can set an assignment to run there, and they will use the Deskpad Learn add-on to work with Sage and submit without leaving the document. The add-on and a step-by-step walkthrough are linked in the Google Docs menu above, and the rest of the experience works the same way for you.
Ready to set up your first assignment?
Deskpad Learn is completely free to use.