At the end of January TeacherMade added a bunch of new features to their popular platform for creating online activities for students. Last week they added perhaps the best feature yet, that is the ability to create  drag-and-drop activities with your existing PDFs and Word docs. Additionally, you can create an entire drag-and-drop activity from scratch in the TeacherMade activity editor. 

Creating drag-and-drop map activities was the first thing that I thought of when I saw TeacherMade’s new activity creation option. So the first drag-and-drop activity that I made in TeacherMade was based on a map of New England. To make the activity I used a map and a list of states that I already had in a Google Document. I downloaded that Google Doc as a PDF then uploaded to TeacherMade where I then use the editing tools to create boxes around each state’s name and a box (TeacherMade calls them landing zones) on each state to which the names should be dragged. A complete overview of this short process is available in this video. 

Like all TeacherMade activities, drag-and-drop activities can be automatically scored for you. To do that just set and answer key and point values for each “landing zone” in the drag-and-drop activities that you create. That process is outlined in the video above.

Finally, it’s worth noting that you don’t have to be a great graphic designer to make good-looking activities in TeacherMade. You can use something like Canva to find a great worksheet template and then import it into TeacherMade to create an online activity to share with your students. My demonstration of how to use Canva templates in TeacherMade can be watched right here.