A better way to manage homework

April 2026

Stay on top of what students are working on — even when assignments span multiple days.

Why this change?

For years, every lesson in Mosaic had a single “Homework” text box. It worked, but it had some real problems — and fixing them was the driving motivation behind this update.

Stale homework for students and parents. Teachers rightfully reuse their planbooks year after year, tweaking the main content for each new class. But the homework box was easy to overlook, and students and parents would often see assignments from last year’s class — the wrong page numbers, the wrong chapter, the wrong due date. We heard this concern repeatedly, and it was the single biggest reason we rebuilt this part of the app.

Ambiguous due dates. “Finish the worksheet” — but was that due for next class, or by Friday? Families often couldn’t tell. With a free-text box there was no way to capture when the assignment was actually due.

Assignments that disappeared too soon. A project assigned on Monday but due Friday would show up in the homework view on Monday — and then vanish, because Tuesday through Thursday each had their own homework boxes. Students had no way to see “what am I still working on this week?” across multiple days.

No way to separate distinct assignments. Two homework items on the same day — say, a math worksheet and a reading response — had to share one text box, making it awkward to give them different due dates or different levels of detail.

What’s new

Homework is now a list of individual assignments attached to each lesson, instead of one big text field. Each assignment has its own title, instructions, and due date.

Teachers must review before families see it

Here’s the most important part: a homework assignment is not visible to students or parents until it has a due date set. When you roll a planbook forward to a new year, the homework items come along but their due dates are intentionally cleared. This guarantees that every assignment families see has been reviewed and re-approved by you for the current year. No more accidentally stale homework.

An amber warning badge appears on any lesson with homework that still needs a due date, so you always know what’s waiting for your attention.

Assignments stay visible until they’re due

A project assigned on Monday with a due date of Friday now appears in the homework view every day from Monday through Friday — not just on the day it was first assigned. Long-term assignments no longer slide off the radar. Students and parents can see their ongoing work at a glance.

Separate items can be truly separate

When you assign two unrelated pieces of homework on the same day, they can live as independent items with their own titles, instructions, and due dates. You can give the worksheet a due date of tomorrow while the long-term project is due in two weeks.

A check-off list for students and parents

Students and parents can now see their homework as a real to-do list they can check off as they work through it. Each side has their own independent checkbox — a student checking off an item doesn’t affect what the parent sees, and vice versa, but each can see when the other has marked something complete. Checking off assignments is for personal organization only and does not submit work to the teacher.

What you need to do

1. Review your migrated homework

Your existing homework text has been automatically converted into the new format:

• Each line of your old homework box became its own assignment. If you typed Read chapter 5 on one line and Worksheet 12 on the next, those are now two separate assignments.
• The first 255 characters of each line become the assignment title. Anything longer spills into the instructions field.
• For lessons in the recent past and the next week, due dates were auto-filled to the day after the lesson. For lessons further in the future, due dates were left blank on purpose — so you can set them when you’re ready.

Take a few minutes to browse through your upcoming lessons and make sure the migrated assignments still reflect what you want students to do.

2. Assign due dates to anything flagged amber

Any homework item without a due date is hidden from students and families. When you open a lesson (or look at the week view or planbook dashboard), you’ll see an amber warning any time there’s an unassigned due date. Click the Assign due date button to set it.

The fastest way to triage these is from the planbook dashboard — it surfaces a warning count for upcoming lessons at a glance.

3. Split combined assignments if it makes sense

If your old homework box had several unrelated items crammed into a paragraph, the migration may have treated them as a single assignment. Use the Split button on any homework item (the columns icon) to open a dialog that lets you paste parts of the text into separate rows, each with its own title, instructions, and due date.

Where to manage homework

You can view and edit homework in three places, depending on what you’re doing:

• Lesson detail page — the full homework editor. Add, edit, split, delete. Also shows cross-lesson “Due today” and “Ongoing” summaries so you can see what students are working on beyond just this lesson.
• Planbook week view — edit homework inline as you plan your week. Click a lesson card to open its inline editor; the homework section works the same as on the lesson detail page.
• Teacher week view — edit homework in the sidebar when you open a lesson, across all your planbooks at once.

All three share the same data, so an edit in one place appears everywhere immediately.

Questions?

Reach out to support — we’d love to hear how the new homework system is working for you.