Make your Word documents interactive with TeacherMade

​Many teachers have their hard drive full of old Word documents on that were made to be printed and given to students on paper. The usage of these documents is declining at a furious pace, but that does not mean that they have become useless! They just need to be heated up a bit and then they can be used many more times!

TeacherMade

​I recently read about TeacherMade in a Facebook group and since I have already tested a plethora of similar tools, my expectations were moderate, to say the least. But I was actually pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to use and as a bonus, it was free for real (no hidden costs!). The idea behind TeacherMade is simple. It simply converts your old Word documents (or pdf's) into interactive and self-correcting documents that can be shared on a learning platform.
 
Once you have created your interactive document, you can click on "My worksheets". You then select "assign" in the drop-down list and you will have the choice if you want to publish the assignment in Google Classroom or if you want to send a link to the students. When the student is to work on their assignment, they are taken directly to the worksheet and can get started on their assignment.
 
Unfortunately there is not yet a way to collect students' results and send them on to the learning platform, but TeacherMade have promised that this function will come in October 2020. So far, as a teacher you can go back to TeacherMade and click on the assignment to see the students result.
 
There are plenty of great features in TeacherMade, but one thing that bothered me is that students are limited to one try on each assignment.  If they try to go back to the spreadsheet, they will be met by a message that says that they has already completed the task. The teacher can unlock the exercise manually, but it feels like an unnecessary step that TeacherMade should remove. Naturally, it would be better if students could work on their assignments as many times as they wanted!
 
Despite this I want to give TeacherMade a very high rating! It is so easy to create different types of spreadsheets that suit different subjects and I like that TeacherMade allows me to make good use of all my old documents. For that, I love it!

Take me to TeacherMade!

Maria Rådstam

ICT-teacher

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