These have been around for ages but I have never used them for one good reason, it didn't used to be possible to include images which means it was impossible to show graphs or photographs of calculations. Now it's possible so I will be adding short writing tasks to all of the activities in the online course. These will be very useful for tracking progress which can be very difficult with students working on different things in class and remotely.

Students tend to skip the practical work which I find rather strange, it was the practical work that drew me to this subject, when I was at school I used to do extra practicals in the lunch hour. So a lot of the written tasks will be used for students to provide evidence that they have carried out the experiments and observations.

You can also add writing tasks yourself but you can't add them to the existing pages. This is all done via the student access user interface.

In the list of site pages you can see which contain writing tasks   and which contain quizzes  .

The writing task pages are also listed under "In-page written tasks".

To add your own writing tasks you go to custom essay.

To mark the tasks you go to the results manager and click the tick which indicates the task has been submitted. This allows you to open for marking and comments (both in the margin and at the end).

With this new feature we now have a fully fledged learning management system. I will still use Google classroom for managing the internal assessment but everything else goes through thinkib. If you haven't already tried "student access" give it a go.