TeacherMade is a platform for creating online, interactive assignments for your students. I first covered it in the fall of 2020 and since then it has rapidly grown in popularity. One reason for that growth is that TeacherMade lets you take your existing favorite documents and turn them into automatically graded online assignments. You can even use it to add audio to your document-based assignments.

As any good edtech tool should, TeacherMade has continuously made improvements and added features since its inception. The latest round of updates to TeacherMade include some great enhancements to the way that you can provide feedback to your students and the ways that students can complete assignments.

Updates for Teachers!
TeacherMade now offers you the ability to record individualized audio feedback on your students’ assignment submissions. You can also now draw and highlight on your students’ submitted assignments. Doing that should make it a lot easier for students to understand exactly what you’re giving them feedback on. That could be particularly handy when giving feedback on an assignment that has large blocks of text in it. Finally, you can now reward your students with fun stickers and emojis that you add to their submitted assignments.

Updates for Students!
Updates to the feedback tools aren’t the only things new in TeacherMade in January. Right after the start of the year TeacherMade introduced new options for assignment creation and assignment completion. Those new options include the ability to let students add math expressions to any assignment even those that don’t specifically list a math problem for students. That option could be useful for STEM assignments that contain open-ended questions or prompts.

One of the other early-January updates to the student experience in TeacherMade is an option to enable students to use special characters when completing assignments. This new option supports diacritical marks and special characters found in French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Updates and Resources for Everyone!
TeacherMade is a company that I’ve seen listen to teachers’ feedback and implement as fast as possible. One of the places they get that feedback is in the TeacherMade Community message board. It’s there that you can connect and share ideas with other teachers who are using TeacherMade. It’s also there that you’ll find activities developed by TeacherMade staff and other teachers that you can copy, modify, and use in your classroom. For example, take a look at this collection of activities for teaching about Martin Luther King, Jr. and this collection of shared holiday activities.

The biggest TeacherMade news by far is that TeacherMade Pro is going to be free for all teachers for the next 60 days! This will give all teachers access to all of TeacherMade’s features including syncing Google Classroom rosters with your TeacherMade account. Syncing the two accounts makes it very easy to post TeacherMade activities as assignments in Google Classroom.

To access TeacherMade Pro you don’t need to do anything more than sign into your existing, free TeacherMade account and follow the prompts for accessing the pro version. If you don’t already have a free TeacherMade account, now is the time to get one.

A Cool Combination With TeacherMade
Canva and TeacherMade is a great combination for folks who would like to make great-looking activities but don’t have either the eye for design or the time to make them. You can utilize any of the more than 2,000 worksheet templates offered by Canva and then import them into your TeacherMade account to create interactive, online activities. Watch this video to learn how easy that process is.