Tech Tip Tuesday - SafeAssign Part 2 - SafeAssignments

To continue our series on SafeAssign...we will talk this week about SafeAssignments.

Last week we talked about Direct Submit - which is where instructors can submit papers or groups of papers to SafeAssign for plagiarism checking or just to submit them to the database.  Students do not see a SafeAssign report this way, only instructors do.  Last week's post can be found here.

The other option for submitting items to SafeAssign is by setting up SafeAssignments within your Blackboard course and let the students submit their own work for plagiarism checking.  Each different writing assignment what you wish to use SafeAssign for needs it's own SafeAssignment.

Direct Submit and SafeAssignments are generally not BOTH done, you choose one or the other.

SafeAssignment Pros:

• Students submit the paper themselves
• Both students and instructors see the report to make it a learning experience.
• Becomes a gradable item in the grade book (or just make it worth zero, complete/incomplete)

SafeAssignment Cons: 

• Students opting out of submitting their paper to the Global Reference Database (their paper still get's checked but papers in the future will not be checked against theirs)
• Students only get one chance to submit to SafeAssign unless the instructor manually gives them another chance.  Directions on how to give them another chance can be found here.
• The only way students are able to use SafeAssign is if the course has SafeAssignment submission links set up in it.  If you do not use SafeAssignments then students have no access to use SafeAssign.

Many instructors like to set up SafeAssignments within their course and use it as a learning tool.  Some instructors have students submit to SafeAssign first through the SafeAssignment link, make corrections if necessary BEFORE submitting their paper to the instructor for a grade.  

Other instructors like to have students submit their final paper through a SafeAssignment link as their final gradable paper and take the SafeAssign Report into consideration as part of the paper grade.

To set up a SafeAssignment and review SafeAssign Reports in your course follow this tutorial.

To see what a SafeAssignment looks like in student view click here.

Note: If you have a course that is copied out to you semester after semester and has SafeAssignments already set up in it, SafeAssign in your course needs to be SYNCED every time you get your new course or it will not work.  Directions on how to do that can be found here.

Next Week: Part 3 - Reading and Interpreting A SafeAssign Report