Buzz: Product Feedback

Jerome Flewelling asked me recently how teachers deal with absent work in relation to also using the stop accepting submissions button in Buzz.

I had to reply that I don't think people deal with it well.

Currently, about the only solution that I have is to put the absent kids for that assignment into a group and then take off the due date for that group (or allow late submission, really).

Frankly, that's a bit of a pain and very quickly creates a large number of groups that need to get managed one way or another. 

The other option that I suggested would be to take the due date off while the kid was in front of the teacher, have them submit, and then put it back on.  That might be easier to manage, but would require the kid to be in front of the teacher, which is only really possible in a brick and mortar setting.

Flew's suggestion would be to make the “Allow Retry” override all of those settings.  Then if he stops accepting submissions, but a student comes and pleads their case, he could Allow Retry for just that individual and keep the activity securely locked away from everyone else.  If a student is absent for a week and the assignment times out on the due date, then he could Allow Retry for just that student and it would open the assignment up to just them for that one attempt.

There might be a better way to accomplish this, but hopefully this illustrates our issue and why this feature would help everyone work more efficiently.

Thanks for considering it.