Ms. Rachelle uses TeacherMade to help keep assignments organized. TeacherMade allows her to link to other materials in the assignment to keep her students from clicking between different resources.

How do you use TeacherMade to streamline your assignments?

I'm always looking for ways to cut out extra or unnecessary steps so that students can focus more on the information than the task, and TeacherMade allows me to do that. For my 8th grade Science class, I often link resource pages and websites in my assignments. I feel that this helps to guide students' research and allows them to focus on the information and tasks ahead of them. I like linking resources through TeacherMade because it cuts down on questions like "Where do I go?," "What's the website again?," "I can't find it," and" What do I do now?" It makes my students more independent while I can still direct them where they are supposed to go. It also allows them to stay in one place and limits the amount of "clicks" they need to get to the right place.

How do you create assignments that are easy for your students to navigate?

Typically when I am creating an assignment for my students to access through TeacherMade, I will design it out in Canva and add comments to myself where certain links will be inserted. When I am done designing the assignment, I download it as a PDF and then upload it into TeacherMade. When designing an assignment that I know will be linked, I'll make "buttons" that my students recognize as something that is "clickable." When I put the assignment into TeacherMade, I link the "button" to the correct external link. As long as the web address is still active, the links can be used over and over again, or I can swap them out for new links if the original resource no longer works or I find a better one. 

I don't create links in every assignment, but if there is a research portion or a set of resources they need to complete an assignment, I try to make the needed information as accessible as possible. For example, for one of my student's final assignments this year, they completed research questions and a project based on extinct and endangered species. For each set of questions, I linked them to the source material so that students could read the articles and get the information needed to answer that question set. 

Which programs do you link your TeacherMade projects and assignments to?

For the project portion, the directions included links to sites like Canvas, StoryBoardThat, and Zeeob, which helped them create their project of choice. For Canvas, I made sure to link our class-specific URL so the students would automatically be sent to our Canvas Classroom space. To do this, I went to Zeeob & StoryBoardThat!, copied their web addresses, and pasted them into the linked buttons on TeacherMade. 

Another place where I use links is when assigning Gizmos, a site with interactive lab experiments. Explore Learning already provides the assignment with all the directions, but I sometimes modify it to fit our learning goals better. I link the correct Gizmo and a reminder of how to log in at the top of the sheet that I upload to TeacherMade. 

How do you use TeacherMade with Schoology?

I teach five sections of 8th-grade science, so I have an assignment on TeacherMade for each of my classes to help me stay organized. Once I have created an assignment and linked it to everything my students need, I add it to Schoology. The assignments are then opened on the start date and typically remain open through the end of the marking quarter, even though they have a due date. Until the due date, students can attempt the assignment as often as they want and have it reopened, but after that date, they can only finish their most recent attempt for credit. My students can see their grades on TeacherMade, but their final grade gets recorded on PowerSchool.

How do you use Schoology and TeacherMade to keep students from juggling multiple programs?

By being able to assign them like this, students know they just need to log in to Schoology and then click on the week's assignment links to get started. As for me, I can quickly go through all of my assignments for the quarter, assignments throughout the day, look for new submissions, and open assignments for my students. I can stay within the TeacherMade and Schoology apps after the project has been assigned, making it much easier than juggling multiple programs. 

TeacherMade saves time

Not only does TeacherMade help my students stay focused by allowing me to embed links into my assignments, but it also saves me time. With TeacherMade, I can also login into the programs at the end of each marking period or school year to fix answer keys and improve the assignment without starting over at square one! 

Bottom Line: TeacherMade works across multiple teaching platforms, including Schoology and Canvas. Upload your assignments into TeacherMade to create robust, digital assignments.