When getting started with Business&ITCenter21, you may not know which parts of the curriculum are best assigned as homework.

Your subscription offers a number of options for you to assign for both classwork and for homework. With so many options, making the choices of what will work best as homework for your classes can be overwhelming.

In this article, you’ll find ideas on which assignments within Business&ITCenter21 are best suited for your students to complete as homework.

As a CTE teacher, you can't spend forever "recreating the wheel" when it comes to homework assignments. But with so many options and ideas out there, how do you choose what’s best for your students?

Watch the video to discover:

Note: Depending on the kind of class you’re teaching and what module you’re using, these recommendations will either be more relevant or less relevant.

Often, teachers derive a lot of benefit from assigning the curriculum’s eLearning lessons and worksheets as homework.

By having your students complete these eLearning lessons and worksheets at home, it frees up more time during class for you to focus on group discussion or hands-on skills work. In other words, this could be a great way to flip your classroom.

Whether using the eLearning lessons this way will work for you depends on the module you’re teaching, however.

The lessons in some modules may be better off taught at home, while for others, it may be best to save them for the classroom.

The Microsoft Office module, for instance, requires access to technology that not every student may have at home. Due to these technological restraints, this module’s eLearning lessons would best be taught in the classroom with computer lab access.

Another solid homework assignment is to create virtual discussion boards using questions from the Reflect phase of the four-phase framework.

Many of the questions in the Reflect phase are specifically designed to get students to think critically about the course material, and assigning these questions as homework gives your students the breathing room they need to think deeply about their answers.

Creating a discussion board for students to post their answers also gives them more insight into what their peers are thinking. You can even use these discussion boards as a way to start conversations about the topics at hand.

For example, why not make it part of their homework to both answer the Reflect question and comment in-depth on the response of another peer?

Once class next resumes, you can also take the most intriguing answers and comments from the board and use them to generate in-class discussions.

It is important to remember, though, that this method of assigning homework will only work if the module you’re using has Reflect phase questions included within it.

Most modules have each of the Four Phases present, but not all of them do. This could interfere with your plans if you wanted to use a Reflect phase question for homework, only for your module to lack that phase.

Many teachers find success assigning projects from the Reinforce phase as homework.

One of the primary reasons teachers do this is to save themselves class time. These projects are often substantial and time-consuming. The best-case scenario is to have time in class to introduce the project and then one or two other times in class to ask for clarification, get peer advice, and add flexibility to their environment, leaving the rest of the project for homework.

Another reason teachers do this is because Reinforce phase projects are often student-led, pushing students to work on their own and apply critical thought to create something new. This makes them an effective homework assignment since students are capable of completing them independently.

These projects can take many forms, like the Marketing module’s Juice Box Package Design project, where students design the packaging of a juice box in order to meet a fictional company’s marketing requirements.

Another project is the Coding Fundamentals module’s Current Event activity, where students research a topic within the module and try to find an online article that relates to the topic they’ve chosen.

Keep in mind, however, that some projects may be better completed in class than at home. Group projects, for instance, usually benefit from having each student close to their groupmates.

Use your best judgment to determine which projects you’d be comfortable assigning for homework.

After reading this article, you should have a better idea of the creative methods teachers use to assign homework for Business&ITCenter21.

However, these are only some of the most common ways teachers assign homework in Business&ITCenter21.

If you’re looking for other ideas on what to assign as homework, join the AES Educator Community group to collaborate with other teachers like you. Their ideas and experience will give you additional insight into the best ways to use the resources that AES offers.