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The Writing Tab

A Supplement to the CompClass Instructor User Guide

Updated 12.08.09

Table of Contents

Overview......................................................................................................................................... 2

My Documents................................................................................................................................ 2

Composing a Document..............................................................................................................3

Copying and Pasting a Document...............................................................................................3

Uploading a Document................................................................................................................4

Submitting a Document...............................................................................................................4

Deleting a Submission................................................................................................................. 6

Submitting after the Deadline......................................................................................................7

Writing and Comment Assignments................................................................................................8

Creating Writing and Comment Assignments..............................................................................8

Changing Writing and Comment Assignment Settings..............................................................11

Allowing Late Submissions....................................................................................................11

Deleting Writing and Comment Assignments............................................................................12

Viewing Writing Assignment Submissions.................................................................................12

Commenting on and Grading Your Students’ Submissions.......................................................13

Reviewing Comment Assignments............................................................................................16

Discussing Comments inside a Submission..........................................................................17

Grading Comment Assignments............................................................................................18

How Students View Comments.............................................................................................19

Printing or Saving a Document with Comments....................................................................20

Creating Peer Review Teams...................................................................................................20

For technical support call 1-800-936-6899.

Getting Started with The Writing Tab

for all versions of CompClass

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Editing Peer Review Teams......................................................................................................22

The Writing Tab and MLA Style....................................................................................................23

Formatting Documents in the Text Editor..................................................................................23

Writing Online and the End of Pagination..................................................................................24

Uploading Original Files into the Author Note...........................................................................26


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OverviewYou can use CompClass’s feature, the writing tab, to create, review, and grade writing and comment—or peer review—assignments for your course. Your students can upload documents they’ve written offline or compose their documents directly in the writing tab’s composing space. When they’re done, they can submit their documents to a writing assignment. Finally, if you set up a comment assignment alongside a writing assignment, your students can conduct peer review workshops in which they review and comment on one another’s work.

The writing tab consists of two pages:

My Documents stores any documents you’ve composed or uploaded. From this page students can compose, upload, and submit documents.

Writing and Comment Assignments is the page you will use to create writing assignments and peer review assignments.

Students submit their documents to a writing assignment. You can also comment on and grade their documents from here.

Students use comment assignments to review and comment on one another’s documents.

To jump between these two pages, click or at the top of the writing tab.

My DocumentsThe My Documents page of the writing tab is where your students will compose, upload, submit, and revise documents for writing assignments. You can use this page for the same purposes, and, if you like, you can even submit one of your own documents for an assignment. For example, you might want to offer up your own sample writing for critique in a peer review.


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Composing a DocumentThe writing tab includes its own word processor so that you and your students can compose, format, and spell check documents directly in CompClass.

To compose a document in My Documents:1. Click the Compose New Document button.

2. Type your text into the composing space, using the toolbar to edit your text.

Note: Unlike the other writing spaces inside CompClass, the composing space inside the writing tab will not allow you to embed video. It will, however, accept URLs, images, and links to other CompClass course content.

3. To save your document, click . Give the document a title and click Save.

When you return to the My Documents page, you’ll see your new document in the list, along with its modified date and word count.

Copying and Pasting a DocumentIf you compose your document outside of the My Documents composing space, you can copy and paste the text of your document into the composing space. Doing so better retains your document’s formatting than uploading your document into the composing space, the instructions for which follow this section.

To copy and paste a document into My Documents:

1. Open the document you composed on your own word processing program.


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2. From the My Documents page, click the Compose New Document button.

3. Select all the text of your document and hit Ctrl+C on your keyboard to copy the text.

4. Place your cursor in the composing space and hit Ctrl+V on your keyboard to paste the text.

5. Use the text editor toolbar to format your text.

6. To save your document, click . Give the document a title and click Save.

When you return to the My Documents page, you’ll see your new document in the list, along with its modified date and word count.

Uploading a DocumentIf you use Microsoft Word to compose your document, you can upload the document into My Documents anytime you wish. Note that doing so may cause your document to change formatting, such as line spacing and font. To better retain your document’s formatting, you may want to copy and paste it into the composing space, the instructions for which precede this section.

To upload a document into My Documents:1. From the My Documents page, click Upload File.

2. Click Browse to search for the document you want to upload.

3. Enter a title for the document.

4. Click Upload.

5. Click Save.

The text of the document appears in the composing space. You can edit it here using the toolbar. As you edit, be sure to save often.

Submitting a DocumentThere are three ways to submit a document for a writing assignment: from the My Documents page, from inside a document open in the My Documents composing space, or from inside a writing assignment.

From the My Documents page:1. Find the document you want to submit for an assignment.

2. Click the Actions button associated with your document.


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3. Click Submit for Assignment.

4. Select the name of the assignment from the Choose Assignment drop-down list.

5. Click Submit.

The assignment to which you submitted the document appears in the Associated Assignment(s) column.

From inside a document open in the My Documents composing space:

1. Click the Submit for Writing Assignment button.

2. Choose an assignment from the list.

3. Click Submit.

From inside a writing assignment:

1. From the Submit an Existing Document drop-down menu, select the document you want to submit.

2. Click Submit.

A message will inform you that you successfully submitted. You can also confirm your submission by checking the information in the lightly outlined box on the writing assignment screen.


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Deleting a SubmissionYou can delete writing assignment submissions—both your own and your students’—from inside a writing assignment by clicking on next to the submission you’d like to delete.

Whether or not the document contains comments, you will be prompted to confirm that you want to delete the document. If the document does not contain comments, the prompt will read as follows:

If the document contains comments, the prompt will read as follows:

Students can delete their own submissions through the writing assignment if and only if three conditions are met:

1. The writing assignment deadline has not passed.

2. The document does not contain comments.

3. The document has not been graded.


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Submitting after the DeadlineUnless you have allowed late submissions, your students will not be able to submit a document to a writing assignment whose due date has already passed. To determine whether you have allowed late submissions, students must check the message inside the writing assignment to which they wish to submit.

To learn how to allow late submissions, see the section in this supplement titled Allowing Late Submissions.

To submit a document to a writing assignment after the deadline has passed:

1. Click the writing tab.

2. Click My Documents.

3. Compose, copy and paste, or upload your document into the My Documents composing space.

4. Save your document and give it a title.


6. Click Writing and Comment Assignments.

7. Click on the title of the writing assignment to which you wish to submit.

8. From the Submit an existing document drop-down list, select the document you wish to submit.

9. Click Submit.

Writing and Comment AssignmentsThe Writing and Comment Assignments page of the writing tab lists any writing assignments you’ve given your students, along with any associated comment assignments.


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From this page, you can create new writing and peer review assignments; change the settings of existing writing and peer review assignments; read, add comments to, and grade your students’ documents; create and edit teams of students for peer review; and view and discuss comments made by class members during peer review.

Creating Writing and Comment AssignmentsImmediately after you create a writing assignment in the writing tab, students can submit their documents to it and can switch their submissions up until the writing assignment due date. Likewise, immediately after students submit to a writing assignment, you can review, give feedback on, and grade their documents.

Note: If, before a writing assignment due date has passed, a student tries to revise or switch a submission on which comments have already been made, the student is warned that comments will be deleted if she or he continues. If you make comments on submissions before the writing assignment due date has passed, you may want to institute a classroom rule: “Once I’ve made comments on your writing assignment submissions, you cannot revise or switch your submissions.”

If you associate a comment assignment with a writing assignment, students can review and comment on one another’s work. If you like, you can assign points for participation in such a peer review.

To create writing and comment assignments for students:


2. From Writing and Comment Assignments, click to open the Add a Writing Assignment window.


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3. Enter a name for the assignment.

4. Use the text editor to write brief instructions for the assignment. If you want to skip this step, you can add them later by editing the assignment’s settings.

5. Set a due date and time for the assignment. Students can submit documents and revise submitted documents anytime before this date.

6. If you want to let students submit documents after the writing assignment deadline has passed, tick Allow Late Submissions.

7. If you want to be able to grade the documents students submit, select Include item in Gradebook, choose the gradebook category, and enter how many points the assignment will be worth.

8. Click Create Writing Assignment.

9. The Add a Comment Assignment window will appear, which will let you set up a peer review for the assignment. If you don’t wish to create a comment assignment, click Create Writing Assignment Only; otherwise, proceed to the next step.


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10. Enter a name and instructions for the comment assignment. Again, you can always change or add these later by editing the assignment’s settings.

11. Set a due date that gives students a sufficient amount of time to review one another’s work.

12. If you want to be able to grade the students’ peer reviews, select Include item in Gradebook, choose the gradebook category, and enter how many points the assignment will be worth.

13. Select the Instructor Comment Viewable By setting. If you want all class members to be able to see your comments on your students’ documents, select All Course Members. If you want only yourself and the document’s author to see your comments, select Instructor and Author Only.

14. Click Create Comment Assignment.

15. Click Done in the displayed message box, or click Add Peer Review Teams to create peer review teams for this assignment. (For more information on creating peer review teams, see the “Creating Peer Review Teams” section of this user guide.)

Your new writing and comment assignments appear on the Writing and Comment Assignments page. To edit settings for an assignment, click the assignment's due date.


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Changing Writing and Comment Assignment SettingsAfter you create a writing or comment assignment, you may want to change its settings, such as the due date, gradepoint value, or student instructions. You can do so either from the Writing and Comment Assignments page, or from inside the assignment itself.

To change settings from the Writing and Comment Assignments page:

1. Click the assignment’s due date.

2. Adjust any settings you wish.

3. Click Save when you’re done.

To change settings from inside a writing or comment assignment:

1. Click change settings in the CUSTOMIZE menu at the top left of the assignment’s screen.

2. Adjust any settings you wish.

3. Click Save when you’re done.

Allowing Late Submissions

By default, students cannot submit documents to a writing assignment whose deadline has passed. If you’d like to accept late submissions, tick Allow Late Submissions when you create the writing assignment or tick Allow Late Submissions from the Writing and Comment Assignments page after you create the assignment.

Late submissions will be highlighted in pink in the Date Submitted column within the User Submissions table on a writing assignment’s page.


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Deleting Writing and Comment AssignmentsIf you make a mistake or decide against giving a writing or comment assignment, you might want to delete it from the writing, as well as the assignments, tabs.

To delete a writing or comment assignment:

1. Click on the assignments tab.

2. Locate the assignment you wish to delete.

3. In the Actions column at the far right of the screen, click the Remove button associated with the assignment you wish to delete.

4. Click either Unassign or Delete.

Viewing Writing Assignment SubmissionsTo filter, sort, read, grade, or delete your students’ submissions for a writing assignment:


2. From the Writing and Comment Assignments page, click the name of the writing assignment for which you want to view submissions. A table of submissions appears, showing titles, authors, and dates submitted, as well as commenting, grading, and deleting options.


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Commenting on and Grading Your Students’ SubmissionsThere are two ways to make comments on your students’ submissions:

1. If you’ve created a writing assignment but not an associated comment assignment, you can comment on students’ submissions from inside any given writing assignment by

clicking on to the right of each author’s name. By default, only you and the submission’s author will be able to see your comments.

2. If you’ve created a writing assignment and an associated comment assignment, you can comment on submissions from inside either the writing or the comment assignment.

If you want your comments to be visible only to yourself and the submission’s author, be sure the comment assignment is set to private.

Alternatively, if you want all class members to see all comments, be sure the comment assignment is set to public.

To check a comment assignment’s privacy setting:

i. Open a document from within a comment assignment.

ii. Select Instructor Comments Settings from the Options drop-down menu.


Filter submissions by section.

Sort columns by clicking the arrows.

Add comments and/or grade a submission..

Delete a submission.

View a student’s grade. If you

haven’t yet given a grade, the column will

contain hyphens.

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iii. Follow the instructions to either expand or limit who can see your comments. The change you make here will apply to all submissions for this assignment.

Making comments on a submission works the same whether you access the submission from inside a writing or a comment assignment.

To make comments on a submission:1. Open a writing or comment assignment.

2. Click on a submission’s title.

3. To attach a comment to this submission, select any characters, words, sentences, or paragraphs. An Add Comment window will open.

4. Type your comment in the writing space. You can use text editor tools to format the text.

If your course space contains an e-book, click the E-Book Quick Links drop-down menu to drill down to a section of the e-book to which you’d like to link.

To insert a link to some other course material, select Course Content Link from the Link drop-down menu and browse to the material to which you want to link.

To save the comment to use again when correcting other submissions, select Add to Comment Library and enter a title for the comment in the Title text box.

5. Click Submit Comment.


BSM, 12/08/09,

Note to Lynette: Delete from WritingClass version!!

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6. When you’re done adding comments, you can click the Options drop-down menu at the upper-right corner of the screen and select Next Submission to begin commenting on the next submission or Previous Submission to return to the submission on which you just commented.

To grade a writing assignment submission:

1. Open the submission from within a writing assignment.

2. Make comments, if you like.

3. Click .

4. Enter a number in either the Percentage or Points text fields and use the General Feedback text editor to make summative remarks.

5. When you’re done, click Save Grade.


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Reviewing Comment AssignmentsTo view, filter, and sort submissions to a comment assignment:

From the Writing and Comment Assignments page, click the title of the peer review assignment for which you wish to review submissions.

Within the body of a submission, comment insertions are indicated with numbers beginning with [1]. The comments themselves appear in a column to the right. Instructors’ comments are yellow.

To read comments that your students made during peer review:1. Click the title of the submission you want to view.


Filter submissions by

section.

Use the arrows to sort the columns.

Click a submission title to view comments.

Peer review team names appear here.

The total number of comments per submission

appears here.

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2. Read the comments in the column on the right. Their numbers correspond to the numbers in the document.

Discussing Comments inside a Submission

You may want to discuss your students’ comments. For example, say in a peer review of a first draft, you asked students to focus on major issues. As you’re reviewing the documents, you

notice Student A consistently commenting on punctuation. You can use the button to help Student A focus on more appropriate issues for the drafting stage.

To discuss comments inside a submission:

1. Click on inside the comment you want to discuss. This opens the Show Comment window.

2. Click Discuss to open the Discuss Comment window.

3. Click Reply.

4. Type the text of your reply and click Post.


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The number on the Show Discuss button indicates the number of replies to a comment. To read or add to the discussion, repeat the preceding steps.

Grading Comment Assignments

As with grading writing assignments, you will be entering a grade within a student’s peer review submission. The difference is that you won’t be grading the submission itself; you’ll be grading the quality of the comments each student made on his or her peers’ work.

To grade a comment assignment that has peer review teams:

1. From the Writing and Comment Assignments page, click on the title of the peer review assignment.

2. Filter and sort the submissions table as desired.

3. Use the Peer Review Team column to quickly identify on which submissions a student would have made comments.

4. Open the first submission.

5. Read the student’s comments and discuss any you like.

6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 until you’ve reviewed all the student’s comments.

7. Open the student’s peer review submission.

6. Click .




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To grade a comment assignment without peer review teams:

1. From the Writing and Comment Assignments page, click on the title of the peer review assignment.

2. Filter and sort the submissions table as desired.

3. Click on the title of the first submission in the list.

4. Review and discuss all comments by a single student.

5. Select Next Submission from the Options drop-down menu.

6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 until you have reviewed all comments by a single student.

7. Open the student’s peer review submission.

8. Click .



How Students View Comments

Students can view comments on their documents from My Documents, through the writing assignment, or through the comment assignment.

To view comments from My Documents:

1. Click on the writing tab.

2. Click My Documents.

3. Locate the submission title. Click the View Comments button associated with this submission.

To view comments through the writing assignment:



3. Click on the writing assignment title.


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4. Click on the submission title.

To view comments through the comment assignment:



3. Click on the peer review assignment title.

4. Click on the submission title.

Printing or Saving a Document with Comments

To print or save a document with comments, select Printable Version (Comment Mode) from the Options drop-down menu in the upper-right corner of the screen.

The document opens in a separate browser window. From here, you can print it or save an HTML copy onto your computer.

Creating Peer Review TeamsTo enable students to peer-review one another’s work, you must first associate a comment assignment with a writing assignment. By default, a comment assignment allows all class members to review all submissions. However, to make peer review a more meaningful and manageable experience, you can create peer review teams and direct students to review only their team members’ submissions.

After you set up one or more pairs of writing and comment assignments, you can create teams of students from scratch, tell CompClass to randomly generate teams, or copy existing teams from another assignment. You can create teams before or after your writing assignment is due. If you wait until after, you can include only students who have submitted a paper so that none of your students will be paired with a partner who has not done his or her work.

To filter students by CompClass course section:



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2. On the Writing and Comment Assignments page, click next to the comment assignment for which you wish to create teams.

3. By default, the Course Members table lists all students from all sections in your CompClass course space. To filter this list by section, use the All Groups/Sections drop-down menu to select the section for which you’d like to create teams.

To manually create peer review teams:

4. By default, the first team created will be named Team 1, but you can change the name to whatever you like.

5. Click Add Students to Team.

6. Click on the names of the students you want to be in your first team. Their names will appear in the team’s box.

7. Click .

8. To create another team, from the Options drop-down menu, select Create New Team.

9. Repeat steps 5–8 until you have placed all of your students in peer review teams.

10. Click Done at the bottom of the list of students to view all of your teams.

To randomly generate teams:

1. From the Options drop-down menu, select Create Random Peer Review Teams.


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2. Type in the number of students you want in each team.

3. Check the box next to Include only students who have submitted an essay for this assignment if you want to limit the teams to students who have submitted their work.

4. Click Generate Random Teams.

5. Click .

To copy existing teams:

1. From the Options drop-down menu, select Copy Teams from Other Assignment.

2. From the Select an Assignment drop-down menu, choose the assignment from which you want to copy your peer review teams.

3. Click Copy Teams from this Assignment.

4. Click .

Editing Peer Review TeamsIf you make a mistake while adding students to teams, or if you want to set the teams up differently, you can edit your peer review teams.

To edit your peer review teams:


2. On the Writing and Comment Assignments page, click next to the comment assignment for which you wish to edit the teams.

3. You now have several options:

To remove a student from a team, click [remove] next to a student’s name.

To undo changes you made since the last time you saved your work, from the Options drop-down menu select Revert to Last Save.

To delete all peer review teams, from the Options drop-down menu select Clear All Teams.


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To limit the submissions each student sees to those of his or her peer review team members, from the Options drop-down menu select Comment Team Access Settings and Peer review team members can add comments.

4. Click .

The Writing Tab and MLA StyleWhen students copy and paste or upload documents into the writing tab’s composing space, the text editor doesn’t always retain formatting such as spacing and font. Neither is the text editor capable of inserting headers and footers. However, the document’s author can manually format his or her document to conform to MLA style.

Formatting Documents in the Text EditorTo select all text in a document:

1. Click Edit.

2. Select Select All.

To change font to Times New Roman:


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1. Click Font.

2. Select Times New Roman.

To set hanging indents in a Works Cited page:

1. Click the Insert/Remove Bulleted List button.

2. Select Hanging Indent.

To double-space a document:

1. Click Spacing.

2. Select Double Space.

Writing Online and the End of PaginationAny given online text editor, such as a wiki, Google Docs, or the CompClass My Documents composing space, will not insert or retain page numbers. Thus, writing online involves a shift in thinking of compositions as a number of pages to compositions as a number of words.

Here is a table to help you convert number of pages to word count:


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Number of Pages Word Count

1-2 250-500

2-3 500-750

3-5 750-1250

5-7 1250-1750

8-10 2000-2500

10-12 2500-3000

12-15 3000-3750

15-20 3750-5000

Your students can see the word counts of their submissions in the Word Count column of their My Documents page. You can ask them to copy and paste a submission’s word count into the Author Note of the submission’s commenting space.

To copy and paste a submission’s word count into the Author Note:


2. From the My Documents page, copy the submission’s word count from the Word Count column.

3. Click the View Comments button associated with the submission.

4. Click .

5. Paste the word count into the text editor.

6. Click Submit.


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Uploading Original Files into the Author NoteThe Author Note inside a submission’s commenting space is for students to direct your attention to parts of the submission that need most help. However, students could use the Author Note in another way: After submitting their documents to a writing assignment, students could upload their original documents into the Author Note, which would preserve MLA formatting. In this way, you could open the original files to check for MLA formatting while you are making comments on submissions.

To upload a document into the Author Note:

1. Submit a document to a writing assignment.

2. From the My Documents page, click the View Comments button associated with the submission.

3. Click .

4. In the text area, type something like “This is my original document in MLA style.”

5. Select the word “document.”

6. Click Link and Website/Uploaded File.


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7. Click Target and Find/Upload File. Search for the file you wish to upload.

8. Browse for the file you wish to upload and click Upload File.

9. The Uploaded Files window will list all of the files you’ve uploaded into CompClass. Select the correct document by clicking on the file name.

10. Click OK.


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11. Click Submit..

You, the instructor, will now be able to view the document to grade the student on MLA style. Click the linked word in the Author Note to open the file.
