Overview

The Threads & Themes assignment editor is designed to streamline how you review, prepare, and deliver lessons to your students.

Every assignment you open comes pre-filled with a complete, expertly designed lesson from the Threads & Themes curriculum team. While these lessons are ready to teach right out of the box, the assignment editor gives you complete flexibility to edit, customize, and tailor the content to perfectly fit the unique needs of your classroom and your students.

Structure of the Editor Page

The editor provides a clean, focused environment for reviewing and modifying your lesson content:

Top Menu

The menu at the top of the page provides access to core actions such as viewing Teacher Notes, Preview, accessing Notifications, and Restore Deleted Items, as well as the Assign button.

Header

Located at the top of the editor, the header is where you establish the overarching details and look of the lesson. By interacting with the header block, you can:

Edit the Title: Simply click on the title text to rename the assignment.
Add Student Instructions: Provide general directions, learning goals, or context that students will read before they begin the lesson.
Organize with Tags: Add lesson tags to help you categorize and quickly locate the assignment later.
Customize the Background & Image: Personalize the visual presentation by uploading a header image or changing the background color. You can easily toggle between different design layouts, such as displaying your image as a smaller inset picture or expanding it to fill the entire header background.

The Table of Contents in the left-hand sidebar is designed to help you easily navigate large, multi-section lessons:

Section Navigation: The Table of Contents lists the distinct sections of your lesson. These sections are fully clickable, allowing you to seamlessly jump between different parts of the assignment.
Workspace Organization: To keep your workspace tidy as you build or review a lesson, newly created sections default to a collapsed state.

Teacher Notes

Your Teacher Notes are crucial for delivering the curriculum effectively. The editor provides dedicated tools to support your instruction:

Section-Level Focus: You can organize, edit and review your instructional notes at the section level. The Teacher Notes view will adjust to display those relevant to the section block you click into.
Color-Coded Panels: The Teacher Notes include highly visible, color-coded and editable callout panels. The available panels are:
- Guidance
- Pacing Notes
- Teacher Tips
- ELD Supports
- Differentiation
- Sample Responses
Live Session Visibility: When you launch a live Teacher-Paced session, your Teacher Notes for the current section display directly in your floating control panel. This allows you to reference your script and tips without ever leaving the presentation view!

Preview

When selecting the Preview option, you will land on a read-only page. This view focuses purely on the instructional material, allowing you to review the content exactly as it will flow for your students.

Teacher Notes are also available in the Preview mode, although they will not be viewable to your students. You can view the Teacher Notes side-by-side with the students' view to confirm alignment and prepare for your presentation.

Building & Editing Your Lesson

The editor makes it easy to customize the curriculum or build your own activities from scratch. You can structure your lesson using sections, add multimedia content, and insert interactive questions.

Adding Sections

To break your lesson into manageable chunks, click the (+) Add Item button at the bottom of the page or between existing blocks, to open the item menu, and select '+ Section'. This creates a new section block where you can add specific instructions, content, and questions.

Adding Content and Questions

Click the (+) Add Item button anywhere in the editor to open the item menu. From here, you can select from a wide variety of content blocks and interactive question types.

Adding Content & Parsing Documents

Available Content Types

Enhance your lesson by adding multimedia and text blocks. Options include:

Text: Add formatted text, links, and tables.
Media: Embed Images, Google Slides, Audio, and Video (including YouTube, Vimeo, and Wistia links) directly into the lesson.
Interactive Elements: Add Whiteboards (Show Your Work) for visual instruction, or embed external web tools using the Embed block.

Uploading and Parsing Documents

If you have existing materials, you don't need to type them out from scratch! Click Upload Images or Documents and upload or capture a supported file.

The system will add your content, allowing you to click anywhere on the uploaded pages to instantly add interactive questions on top of your existing materials.

If you upload a PDF:

The system will offer you to parse the document. Selecting 'Generate questions' will pull the text and questions from your uploaded PDF and convert them into text boxes and interactive questions.
Note: If your document is very large and pages fail to process, the system will still import the successful pages and simply notify you of the page(s) that couldn't be read.

Question Types & Custom Styles

The editor includes a robust suite of auto-graded and teacher-graded question types to assess student understanding.

Interactive Question Types

True/False, Multiple Choice & Multiple Selection: Classic standardized formats.
Short Answer & Free Response: For open-ended writing and text input.
Categorize, Matching, Resequence & Match Table Grid: Great for sorting and matrix-style evaluations.
Hot Text & Dropdown: Students select the correct text directly within a passage or from a dropdown.
Fill in the Blank: Students type a response directly within a passage.
Drag and Drop & Hot Spot: Students mark or drag correct answers onto a passage or image background
Drawing: Provides a digital whiteboard where students can draw, type, or upload images to explain their thinking.
Numeric, Graphing & Number Line: Advanced numeric input, graphing, and number line questions for precise math answers.
Audio & Video Responses: Students record answers in audio or video formats.
File Response: Students upload work completed offline as supported files

Custom Lesson Styles

To keep the lesson visually engaging and aligned with the curriculum, you can apply custom styles to your items. Look for the Palette icon on your question block to style it as a:

Reflection
Check for Understanding
Pulse Check

Question Settings, Hints, and Standards

Every question you add can be fully customized using the Settings located at the bottom of the question block. Active settings will display as tags on the question block when the Settings menu is collapsed, so you can check their status at a glance.

Required Status: Toggle whether a student must answer the question before submitting.
Show Your Work: Provides a digital whiteboard where students can draw, type, or upload images to explain their thinking.
Partial Credit, Partial Match, Case Sensitive: Define parameters for auto-grading, accept partially correct responses or equivalencies, and select how much parts of the question will be worth.
Extra Credit, Points Value & Use Rubric: Define how much a question is worth and the grading rubric where needed.
Adding Hints: Provide scaffolding for your students by clicking Add a hint inside the question block. Students will see a lightbulb icon they can click if they get stuck.
Adding Answer Choice Explanations: Provide scaffolding for your students by toggling this option on. Students will see the Answer Choice Explanations when their scores are returned.
Tagging Standards: Ensure your lesson aligns with curriculum requirements using the Standards field on the question block. You can search and batch-select multiple standards. (Tip: If you use AI to help generate a grading rubric, the generated rubric criteria will automatically inherit the standards you tagged on the question!)

The Assignment Editor