What Can Teachers Automate?
This post is shorter than my prior writing here, and won't be recorded as an audio podcast. I'll be putting out more of these shorter posts, but the longer posts with podcasts will continue as well!
In my personal search for ways to improve my productivity and focus as I integrate new and varied elements into my work life, such as mentoring and consulting with the Modern Classrooms Project, editing their podcast, and writing for this blog, I've been exploring ways to use technology to automate tasks that don't require my full, creative attention.
Teaching is a repetitive process - we plan, we teach, we assess, and we repeat this cycle ad nauseam, taking stock and making changes as necessary. In all three stages, there are clearly elements of the work that require us to think critically and creatively, which cannot be automated. Indeed, one big concern I have in the realm of Ed Tech is that a lot of teacher tools automate the wrong aspects of teaching, effectively removing the teacher from situations in which they really do belong, and nothing is more important to me than that my student facing materials (and my student facing self) be authentic and reasonable. The kinds of automation I'm after are much less flashy and much smaller in scope.
For instance, the process of planning follows nearly the same sequence for each unit (decide topic, research, design summatives, write objectives leading to summatives, create presentations for lessons on objectives, etc.), and therefore we can use templates to pre-populate both the materials we develop and the outline of the plans themselves. We complete the same tasks each time and can therefore reuse the same to-do's or checklists.
Our computers can remember and automatically generate these templates and checklists, saving us valuable time that we can spend actually researching and creating. My two most-used automations at the moment are an action I created using the Mac app Alfred to automatically copy a Google Slides template for a new lesson (it just automates the keyboard shortcuts to make a copy so I don't have to click through the menus), and a macro in the jack-of-all-trades app Keyboard Maestro (also Mac only) that sets up all the required materials for a new MCP Mentee (the document I'll use to give feedback, a dedicated folder for all their materials, and a checklist of every task I'll need to complete for that particular mentee) - all I have to do is type a short string ("set me up an MCP mentee" - it rhymes, and it's saved me hours). In both cases, I skip the overhead of setting anything up and just get right to work. An honorable mention goes to Text Expander, the phenomenal snippet expander I use constantly to save and deploy common written feedback (if I ever type the same sentence twice, it goes into Text Expander).
Automation has other benefits besides saving time, too. Filling in a template entails a much lesser cognitive burden than generating something creative from scratch. Staying consistent by automatically generating our materials (our LMS layout, the format of our documents, etc.) can help our students more easily navigate the logistical aspects of class (which are always the same) and spend more time and focus actually learning.
I certainly don't have all the answers - after all, I'm still learning to teach, and I will be for as long as I am a teacher. There is also degree of computer nerdery here and I'm only recently finding my way into that world, but the investment of time and research into these tools has paid huge dividends for me, so I'll probably write up and post new techniques here as I come across them, and maybe even develop some tutorials. For now, I'm keeping a keen eye on the work I do every day to see which parts of it I can potentially hand off to my computer to do for me.