The first week of school is not when you find out your course shell copied badly. It's also not when you want to be learning where Brightspace hides its submission list.
Here's the pattern most of us know too well: the first two weeks go fine, because nothing is due yet. Then the first real assignment closes, and suddenly a third of the class hasn't submitted — and you find out on a Friday afternoon, three days after the deadline, because that's when you finally had a prep period to look.
This checklist is about the setup that makes that not happen. It's split into what to do before students log in, and what to do in the first week itself. The Brightspace-side tasks apply whether or not you use any add-on tools.
Before students log in
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Open the course as a student. Use Brightspace's "View as Student" role before anything else. Course shells copied from last year routinely bring across hidden modules, broken links to last year's files, and release conditions that reference groups that no longer exist. Ten minutes here saves a week of "Miss, I can't see it."
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Fix your due dates before you fix anything else. Copied assignments keep last year's dates, which puts every deadline in the past. That breaks your calendar, breaks the student agenda view, and quietly breaks any tool that filters by due date. Do this first, because almost everything downstream depends on it.
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Set up gradebook categories and weights now. Restructuring a gradebook after there are marks in it is genuinely painful, and Brightspace will happily let you do it in a way that silently changes calculated grades. Decide your categories, weights, and drop rules before the first mark goes in.
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Decide your late and missing policy, and write it down. Not for the students — for you. What counts as missing? At what point do you contact home? If you don't decide this in August, you'll end up deciding it case by case in November, which is how inconsistency happens.
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Check whether your school uses a custom Brightspace domain. Most boards are on a standard brightspace.com address, but some host on their own. It matters for any browser extension you use, and it's a one-time thing to sort out.
If you teach more than one section, do all of the above in one course first and get it right, then copy. Fixing the same due-date problem four times is a bad way to spend the last week of August.
Week one: get your class list somewhere you can use it
Brightspace has your roster. What it doesn't have, in any form you can act on quickly, is a single screen showing each student alongside their work, their marks, and whether you've spoken to their family. That's the gap the first week is for closing.
If you're using ClassWatcher, this is the point where you import: open your Brightspace class list page and the extension offers to pull the roster in. Two things worth knowing before you do:
- Role names are not standard across courses. One course calls them "Student," another "Learner." The import shows you every role it found with a count, so check the boxes actually match before you confirm — especially in a course where you're co-teaching and don't want the other teacher in your student list.
- Parent contact details aren't in Brightspace. Brightspace doesn't store them, so nothing can pull them for you. You add phone numbers and emails yourself, either by typing them in or by importing from a Google Sheet. This is the one genuinely tedious part of setup, and it's much less painful in August than in the middle of a parent-contact crunch.
Week one: decide what you're actually watching
The instinct is to track everything. Don't. A course has forty-odd gradable items and you care intensely about maybe six of them.
A watch list is just that shortlist — the assignments and quizzes whose submission status you want at a glance, without opening each one. Pick the ones where not submitting actually means something: the first major assignment, the diagnostic, the unit test. You can add more later, and you should add the next unit's items as you go rather than loading the whole semester in on day one.
A good rule for the first week: watch the first assignment that's genuinely worth contacting home about. If nothing on your list meets that bar, your list is too long.
The first scan: who hasn't submitted
Once the roster and watch list exist, checking submissions stops being a task. A scan opens your watched pages, reads who has and hasn't submitted, and gives you the list in one place, colour-coded by student.
Two honest notes about what that list means. It reports not submitted at the moment of the scan — it doesn't label anything "late," because whether something counts as late is your policy call, not a piece of data Brightspace hands out. And in-progress quiz attempts count as missing, because an attempt that was started and never finished is exactly the case you want to catch.
Marks, without opening the gradebook
Missing work is only half of the picture, and in September it's the less useful half — you can't tell much from one missed assignment. What you actually want by early October is the shape of a student.
Open any student and you get their marks alongside their missing work: assignments, quizzes, and gradebook columns pulled straight from Brightspace onto one screen, in one click. It's the same information the gradebook holds, arranged per-student rather than per-column, which is the arrangement you need when you're about to have a conversation about a specific child.
Set this up in September and it's already there in November, when interviews arrive and you need a student's full picture in the ninety seconds before their parents sit down.
The first parent contact of the year
The first contact home sets the tone for every one after it. Made early, about something small, it reads as a teacher paying attention. Made in November about an accumulated pile, it reads as an ambush.
From the missing list you can text or email a parent or the student directly, without leaving the screen or opening your board email. Practical details worth knowing up front:
- Messages are metered in credits — one credit per SMS, 0.2 per email. A new account starts with 100, which is enough to cover a first term of normal use for a single class.
- SMS works for North American numbers. Email works anywhere.
- Email replies come straight back to you. Your own address is set as the reply-to, so a parent who hits reply lands in your inbox like any other email.
- Texting is one-way. Messages go out from a shared ClassWatcher number, not your personal phone, and that number doesn't take replies — a parent who texts back gets an automatic note asking them to contact you directly. It's a way to tell a family something, not a channel to have a conversation in. When something needs a real back-and-forth, that still happens the usual way: a phone call, an email, or a text from your own phone.
- Parents can opt out of texts at any time by replying STOP, which is honoured immediately and permanently.
Log it now, so November-you can find it
This is the part that always gets skipped in September and always gets regretted in February, when a parent says "no one ever told us" and you're fairly sure someone did.
Every text and email you send is logged against that student automatically — who, when, and what you said. The part that takes deliberate effort is everything that happens off-platform: the phone call home, the hallway conversation, the word with the office. Those go in as notes against the same student, in the same history.
Do that consistently from week one and two useful things follow. You can see at a glance who you haven't contacted in a while, which surfaces the quiet students who never generate a crisis and therefore never generate a conversation. And the whole history exports to Google Sheets or a spreadsheet whenever you need a record outside the tool.
Contact history follows the student, not the browser. If you set things up on your classroom desktop and later sign in on a laptop at home, your contact log is there. Your class lists and watch lists, though, live in that browser's own storage — so if you work across two machines, set up the watch list on each.
What this setup doesn't do
Worth being straight about, because it's cheaper to know now than to discover in October:
- It's Brightspace-only. If your school is on Google Classroom, Canvas, or Moodle, none of this applies to you. Reading assignment pages is specific to the platform they're built in.
- It's Chrome on a computer. Not iPad, not phone — Chrome on iOS can't run extensions at all. Your marking is probably happening on a laptop anyway, but plan around it.
- It doesn't write anything back to Brightspace. It reads your pages and shows you what's there. Grades, feedback, and submissions stay exactly where they are.
Why September rather than October
Partly the obvious reason: five minutes of setup before students arrive is worth an hour of setup during a week when thirty of them need something. But there's a specific timing point this year.
ClassWatcher is free through October 1, 2026, and moves to paid plans in October. A teacher who sets up in the first week of school gets the whole start-of-year stretch — the roster import, the first watch list, the first scans, the first parent contacts — at no cost, and knows by the time the free period ends whether it's actually earning its place in their week. Setting up in late October means paying to find that out.
Either way, the underlying advice holds and costs nothing: decide what you're watching, get your parent contact details somewhere usable, and make the first contact home early and about something small.