Maybe you found an article, paper, textbook, pdf, report, or any text-based resource online and want to create a worksheet based on it. You have multiple ways to do so.
In this article, we’ll discuss three methods, ranked in order of effectiveness.
1. Create Worksheets From Online Resources with Monsha
This is the easiest, quickest, and smartest way—and it’s free! Monsha for worksheet creation is a game changer because it reads external links for you and formats the worksheet automatically, so you don’t need to worry about writing prompts or handling all the details.
You can use any external URL, YouTube videos, or even upload a file to use as a source for your worksheet. You can include a diverse types of questions and activities. Plus, you can align it to a set of standards and export it in the platform or format you need.
Here’s how to do it:
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Head over to Monsha and sign up or log in—it takes just two clicks!
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Once you’re in, you’ll see a list of resource options. Pick Worksheets if you want to customize the types of activities. But if you’re after something quick and fresh, Smart Worksheets will do the trick by generating activities without much input from you.
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Regardless of what you choose, you’ll be taken to the worksheet creation page. Here, you can assign your worksheet to a course, unit, and lesson. This step is optional, but we recommend doing it to keep your resources organized and make the most of Monsha’s ability to plan your entire course or subject into units and lessons. But feel free to skip it now—you can always attach or detach your resources from a course later.
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Next, choose what you want your worksheet to be based on. You can add a topic, paste a URL, use an article or YouTube video, upload a file or image, or even base it on a resource you’ve created before in Monsha. You can also combine multiple options if needed.
For this tutorial, we’ll select A link from internet.
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Paste the link directly into the field. Make sure the link can be crawled or indexed by bots. Meaning — if the URL can show up in Google search results, Monsha can access it too. Monsha (and ChatGPT, Claude, or Copilot) currently can’t read Google Docs or Slides through URLs.
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If you didn’t assign a course in the earlier step, you’ll need to select the grade level and language in this step.
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Finally, if you chose Worksheet instead of Smart Worksheet, you’ll need to pick the activity types you want to include. Choose only the ones you need and arrange them in your desired order. Currently, the available options are:
📝 Diagram Labelling
📝 Matching Questions
📝 Fill-in-the-Gaps
📝 MCQ (Multiple Choice Questions)
📝 True/False
📝 Compare and Contrast
📝 Open-Ended Questions
📝 Critical Thinking
📝 Practice Problems or Exercises
📝 Writing Prompts
📝 Sequencing Events
Feel free to also include any additional instructions you might have.
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Click Generate, and your worksheet will be ready in seconds!
But there’s even more power in your hands! Once you generate the worksheet, you can:
- Edit it as much as you like with Monsha’s powerful editor, which supports rich content like tables, code, images, equations, and almost anything!
- Re-generate the content with just one click if it’s not quite what you were looking for.
- Differentiate the worksheet based on grade level, language, DOK level, Lexile reading level, or Bloom’s taxonomy.
- Export it as a DOC, PDF, Google Doc, or other formats.
- Create additional content (like a presentation or study material) based on the worksheet you just made.
You can always access your worksheet later from your Monsha account.
Easy, right? Now, let’s move on to the alternative methods.
2. Create Worksheets From Online Resources – Using ChatGPT 4.0
For this to work, you’ll need access to the ChatGPT-4o model because GPT-3.5 can’t read external links or YouTube videos, and GPT-4 can be hit or miss.
Here’s a step-by-step guide:
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Sign in to your ChatGPT console and make sure you’ve selected the GPT-4o model.
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Start prompting with something like this:
You are an expert teacher and educator, skilled at creating effective and detailed resources for your students. Create a worksheet based on the content of the webpage provided below. Consider the instructions while generating the worksheet. Ensure the worksheet is suitable for [grade] and written entirely in [language]. Webpage content: [insert_URL_here] Instructions: [include_what_you_want_in_your_worksheet]
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You might want to align it to your learning goals or curriculum standard as well:
Ensure the worksheet is suitable for [grade], written entirely in [language], and aligned to the standards and learning goals below, each delimited by triple double quotes. Standards: """[standards]""" Learning objectives: """[objectives]"""
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You can also specify the formatting of the worksheet to make it printable:
Format the worksheet by the following instructions:
Provide clear instructions for each activity.
Include descriptions for any images.
Include activity titles and number them, but don’t label any paragraph or component.
Format the worksheet cleanly, keep adequate space for student responses (e.g., lines, blank boxes, spaces) under each question/activity to make it print-ready.
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You might want to add answer keys at the bottom of the worksheet:
At the end, include a separator and provide answer keys for teachers for all activities.
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Finally, download it as a doc or pdf:
Turn the worksheet into a downloadable PDF and a DOCX file and give me the download links.
You can reduce the number of follow-ups though by using a more comprehensive, structured AI prompt for worksheet making.
3. Create Worksheets From Online Resources – Using ChatGPT 3.5, ChatGPT 4, Copilot, and Other AI
If you don’t have access to ChatGPT 4o, or somehow even GPT 4o can’t read your URL, here’s a workaround you can use in ChatGPT 3.5, GPT4, Copilot or Claude:
- Copy the website content into a document of your choice (e.g., Microsoft Word or Google Docs).
- Split the long document into manageable sections.
- Use ChatGPT to summarize each section separately.
- Combine the summaries of each section.
- Summarize the combined summaries to create a more concise overview.
- Repeat this process recursively until you have a summary that covers the entire document. This article demonstrates the steps of summarizing long documents using ChatGPT.
- Now ask ChatGPT to create a worksheet based on the final summary. For this you can follow the prompting steps in Method 2.
Feel free to try all of these methods and see what works best for your workflow. I’m pretty sure you’ll find Monsha to be the ideal choice—not because I’m biased, but because we designed Monsha to give teachers an easy, iterative, and super-quick way to create just-right resources. Give it a go!