Wednesday, September 28, 2022

Five Time-saving Ways for Teachers to Use Technology

Making time for yourself is one of the things that I talk about in my new keynote presentation titled Using Tech to Bring Joy Into Your Teaching. There are many ways that technology can help you get more time for taking care of yourself and doing the things you enjoy outside of professional responsibilities. To that end, here are five time-saving ways to use technology so that you can have more time for yourself. 

Use Smart Replies
If you use Gmail or any G Suite-based email account, enable the Smart Replies function. Smart Replies will predict what you want to write in response to an email in your inbox. Using Smart Replies saves me ten to twenty seconds per reply. Taking an average of fifteen seconds per email for twenty messages in a day and you’ve gained five minutes. Watch this video to learn how to enable Smart Replies in your inbox.

Use Canned Responses
This is similar to using Smart Replies but instead of letting Google guess what you’re going to write, you actually create replies that you save for reuse at any time. This video will show you how to use Canned Responses in Gmail.

If you're an Outlook user, you can create canned responses to use to answer frequently asked questions in your email. Here's a good video overview of how to create and use canned responses in Outlook.

Give Quizzes in Google Forms or Microsoft Forms
If you have to give multiple choice or similar quizzes, use Google Forms or Microsoft Forms. Both will let you create a quiz that your students can take online and have grades automatically calculated for you. An overview of creating a quiz in Microsoft Forms can be watched here. A series of Google Forms tutorials can be seen in this playlist.

Use Scheduling in Your LMS of Choice 
Every popular LMS contains a scheduling tool that you can use to write up a list of assignments and have them distributed on a schedule over the course of a week or month.

Block Yourself from Social Media Sites 
Those times when we check Facebook for “just a minute” are never just a minute and they quickly suck time out of our days without adding much, if any, value to them. Use a Chrome extension like ReCall Study Time or Stay Focusd (intentionally misspelled) to limit the amount of time that you allow yourself to spend on social media sites. Better yet, teach yourself to ignore social media distractions by using Focusable

The 2022-23 Practical Ed Tech Handbook

Every year I publish an updated version of The Practical Ed Tech Handbook. This year it took me a bit longer than usual to get it done. That said, the 2022-23 version of The Practical Ed Tech Handbook is now available for free to anyone who is subscribed to The Practical Ed Tech Newsletter or who registers for it here

This year’s edition of The Practical Ed Tech Handbook has 58 pages divided into thirteen sections.

1. Communication with students and parents – page 5
2. Creating Blogs & Websites – page 9
3. Web search strategies – page 15
4. Digital citizenship – page 17
5. Video creation and flipped lessons – page 22
6. Audio recording and publishing – page 31
7. Backchannels and formative assessment – page 32
8. Digital portfolios – page 36
9. Augmented and Virtual Reality – page 38
10. Intro to Programming and Makerspaces – page 43
11. Accessibility Tools – page 48
12. DIY Game Creation – page 54
13. Helpful things that don’t fit into one category – page 56

You can get your free copy of The Practical Ed Tech Handbook when you subscribe to The Practical Ed Tech Newsletter right here.