Rachelle Pannullo teaches 8th-grade science. She uses TeacherMade to create digital worksheets that auto-grade. She integrates her worksheets with Schoology to make grading a breeze. 

Explain how TeacherMade integrates with your assignment creation.

I teach five sections of 8th-grade science, and I use TeacherMade for virtually every activity in my classroom. There are only a few assignments or tasks that my students do outside of TeacherMade: notes, vocabulary, or Do Nows/Bellringers/Exit Tickets. The majority of their graded assignments are delivered through TeacherMade via Schoology. This includes assignments such as worksheets, labs, escape rooms, virtual field trips, tests, quizzes, review activities, and projects. There are many reasons I choose to assign my work through TeacherMade. 

How do your students do online worksheets in Schoology?

First of all, TeacherMade keeps things consistent in my classroom. Anywhere I can simplify a system and focus more on the science skill being worked on rather than how to work a website, I do it. In the first couple of assignments, my students learn how to use all of the tools in TeacherMade, such as drawing and creating shapes. They also learn pretty quickly how I grade TeacherMade assignments. They know that I give them the chance to redo the assignment and that I go in to check answers and give "override" points manually. They don't have to remember or save any new login information, they go through Schoology, click on my class, then the unit and the week, and they are linked to all my assignments. It's as easy as that.

Secondly, TeacherMades integration with Schoology makes the assignments easy to create, sign, and grade. Schoology is much easier to use than the assignment makers included in my district's LMS and even traditional assignments. I can take any of my new or old resources and "Teacher-fy" them, as my co-teacher likes to say. 

How do digital worksheets save you time?

I can create a TeacherMade assignment and send 150+ copies to my students. From start to finish, this process takes less than 20 minutes! This is especially helpful when I decide last minute that an assignment isn't going to work for the day or if I am unexpectedly out. I don't need to rush out to the copier to make 150+ copies of an assignment or worry about making more when a student loses them or leaves them behind. I can also grade the assignments quickly and give my students feedback in minutes rather than days or weeks.

How do you collaborate with colleagues on online lesson planning?

Another reason I use TeacherMade is that it is extremely easy to share with my co-teachers. My partner teacher and I teach all of 8th-grade science at our school between the two of us. All of the students across the grade get the same assignments, and we can each make adjustments to our own copies if we need to. We also share most of our assignments with our SPED team so they can easily modify them to their needs. They can already see the accepted answers, limiting choices or reducing questions by using the color block tool, so their inclusion students still get assignments that we create but adjusted to their level. 

How do online assignments make your students more accountable?

Lastly, I use TeacherMade for student accountability. With TeacherMade, students can't say "I lost it," "I am doing it," "I'm almost done," "I didn't know where to find it," "I forgot to put my name on it," or "I did it, and YOU lost it." Not only can I monitor them working on my screen, but I can also see their progress and approximate auto-score on the Assignment Screen. I can prompt them to start or skip ahead to another section that they know better. I can also take this data and share their student progress at parent meetings, so they can see what their child has been doing in class. More than once, a student has insisted that they had completed all of their work, and I hadn't graded it yet. I was able to bring up their work on the projector screen to show their parents that this isn't the case. Students know that I monitor their work, and they will compete with their peers to see who can have the highest percentage by the end of class. 

What's the best way to manage grading in your classroom?

In the past few years of education, I have used a few different systems on how to assign students' work and collect it. I have done just paper copies, paper copies and links on a custom teacher website, paper copies and PDF copies on our LMS, paper copies and digital LMS assignments, and PDF copies on the LMS, but none of these combinations have been as successful in my classroom as TeacherMade. I save time, save paper, can collaborate better with my team, give student feedback quicker, and deal with fewer student excuses by using TeacherMade in my classroom.