We spoke with Amanda Mendenhall, a 7th-grade Geography teacher, about how she uses TeacherMade to collaborate and share student assignments with her co-teacher.

How do you use TeacherMade in your classroom?

I currently teach 7th-grade Geography at a rural school with about 350 kiddos in my building. TeacherMade has made my life so much easier, and grading papers for 100+ kids is not such a daunting task anymore. I am able to collaborate with my special education co-teachers and accommodate their/our students without making them feel excluded from the rest of the class.

How do you use TeacherMade to create interactive assignments?

I currently have a curriculum that allows my students to do the work on their devices and in their textbooks, but it is really hard to grade each assignment. The curriculum also includes PDFs of each assignment, so I take the PDFs and put them in TeacherMade and make them interactive. I am able to put drag and drop in some assignments, short answers, fill in the blanks, and multiple choice answers for the students instead of just short answers. Since my students are 1 to 1, we are able to assign the work to their Google Classroom, and they can work on it. The students are able to have a little fun while they are learning. 

How do you use TeacherMade for exit tickets?

I use TeacherMade for exit tickets from the lesson of the day. The students are excited to complete the exit ticket because it gives them automatic responses. This allows them to see how they did instantly.

Tell us how you save time using TeacherMade

Creating assignments one time and being able to copy the assignment for each hour of the day saves me so much time and allows me to help my students individually. I am able to take the assignment I created for the regular education learners and modify it for my special education learners. I don’t have to reinvent the wheel for each assignment. The regular education students don’t even realize the special education students have a different assignment.  

How do you collaborate with your co-teachers using TeacherMade?

I have a special education teacher and a co-teacher I work closely with on a daily basis. Before I started using TeacherMade, this was daunting and difficult. I had to share each assignment with them, they would be able to look at it, and then they had to copy it to use it. With TeacherMade, I made them co-teachers to my classwork, and they can open it and use it. The special education teacher is able to see if her students were successful or not and reassign the work if they were not successful. The special education teacher is able to comment and help the students with the modified work. They are able to see the real-time work of the students. My co-teacher is able to stay on pace with me and is able to use the assignments I use. He teaches the same class I do, so this makes his life easier since he teaches three grade levels. All three of us are able to assign the work to our Google Classroom.  

How do you use TeacherMade’s auto-grading feature in your classroom to reduce cheating?

I absolutely love that TeacherMade allows me to return the work immediately or when I grade it. This has become one of my favorite features. We all know seventh graders aren’t the most honest when it comes to school work, so it has slowed down the cheating from hour to hour. The students will get together in class and after class to work on the assignment since one can’t complete the assignment and get the correct answers to give to others. I can return assignments after collecting them all, which has helped to alleviate or divert some students from cheating. I truly love using TeacherMade in my classroom.

TeacherMade gives you the ability to share digital worksheets and interactive activities with other teachers. Take what other teachers have already made and adapt it to fit the needs of your students.