Too busy to learn short cuts?

Ninja teacher to the rescue!

I know teachers so busy that they have to schedule their bathroom breaks. They spend entire weekends grading projects and papers while their families go out to the game, the park, the concert. I know one teacher who gets up at four in the morning to make comments on AP practice exams and another who recently went two weeks without seeing his family because he was putting in fifteen-hour days. Given the demands of the job, teachers often find themselves too busy to invest time in mastering the very tools that could make their professional lives easier.

If this sounds like you, don’t read this post all the way through. You don’t have time. Instead, skim the problems described below to find those you recognize. Read about those solutions only. Welcome to the world of the Ninja Teacher.

Problem 1: You lose class time most days explaining yesterday’s work to absentees.

Solution: Post daily agendas and homework in your Schoology calendar, including links to videos or PDFs used in class that day. If you’re not sure how to do this, watch this video.

Example of a Humanities class daily agenda and attachments in the Schoology calendar.

Problem 2: You send 30 minutes or more each day answering email from students.

Solution: Train your students to post their questions in the Schoology update feed. Most of the time, other students will answer these questions before you do. When you answer yourself, you will do so knowing you only have to answer once. Everyone in class will see your response.

Students helping each other out in an update feed.

Problem 3: You spend more hours than you can count checking in student practice.

Solution(s): Below are some of the top strategies for simplifying this job.

• Schoology work completion folders. If you set up tasks in a Schoology folder and set this folder for work completion, you can easily keep track of how much work each student has finished. Here is a short video explaining how to do this.

• For $25 a year, you can take advantage of Quizlet’s Premium account, allowing you to keep track of student practice at a single glance, as shown below. Quizlet is an especially powerful tool as students prepare for exams and finals involving terminology or the mastery of factual information.

Example of a Quizlet Class Progress page

• For $100 a year, teachers can purchase the premium version of Grammarly, offering the most sophisticated editing software available. This is too expensive for many teachers but probably not for English teachers who spend countless hours marking punctuation and grammar errors in papers, then recollecting work to see that these errors have been addressed. Although Grammarly does not allow teachers to upload classes, students can simply share the teacher’s account with one another. Grammarly not only helps students with corrections, but it also provides explanations and short lessons to help student writers improve. Students who have completed their editing can be checked in at a glance.

Teacher view of student papers submitted to Grammarly. The numbers indicate unresolved editing errors.

The view from within a paper using Grammarly’s editor.

• Teachers can create a FREE account on Khan Academy, add individual classes, and check in student practice at a glance. This site specializes in math and science practice, but it offers help for grammar and reading practice as well. Students begin with diagnostic assessments then watch themselves improve as they move through individualized exercises, and demonstrating mastering can be as simple as turning in a screen shot of accomplishments.

The highlighted bars on the left fill in as students develop their skills.

The site identifies particular skills that the student may still need to master.

• Use the homework function in Nearpod to quickly check in student practice. Nearpod sends teachers easy-to-read reports of completed student work. District 214 has purchased a premium subscription for teachers, so this service comes at no cost to educators here.

• Although the Goodreads site takes time to master, it allows teachers to keep track of what students are saying about their reading, how much they are reading, and whether or not they are completing their reading when they should. Because Goodreads is a social site, students can discuss their reading with each other and write reviews seen not just by the teacher but by other readers (and sometimes even by the author of the book).

A view of student updates from the group page on Goodreads.

Problem #4: You’re still using the screen menu to navigate because you’ve never memorized the shortcuts, so simple tasks take longer than they should.

Solution: Learn one new shortcut a week. Begin noticing when you have to use the screen menu, and make note of the shortcuts you see there.

Below are 10 essential keyboard shortcuts that tend to be underused:

Problem #5: You present all your class lessons live. You do this every day.

If you love teaching, you are probably a talented, inspiring, and effective presenter. Perhaps this is even why you became a teacher. This is also, most likely, the main reason you are exhausted every day. If you regularly present your lessons to five classes, you are probably struggling to find the time you need to do your job well. Your students have to meet you outside of class to have one-to-one conversations, and most all your planning, student assessment, and formative feedback must be done outside of class.

Solution: Even if you don’t want to flip all your lessons, flipping just a few can make a huge difference to your time. To flip a lesson, you have three choices.

1. Record yourself using a tool like Quicktime, iMovie, or Explain Everything. Tutorials for using these tools are here, here, and here.
2. Find pre-made lessons on Youtube Teachers, TedED, or Open Culture. If you haven’t looked at what’s available lately, you will be amazed. Click here for a list of the 10 most popular TedED lessons so far.
3. Assign your students to create the lessons you most often use. Archive the best of these to use over and over again. Tools for student lessons include iMovie, Explain Everything, Educreations, ShowMe, and Adobe Voice. See examples of student lessons here and here.

Problem #6: You’ve never had the money to buy your own laptop, so your school laptop and iPad hold all your personal photos and videos, and now you’re running out of storage space. Because you have so little space, you can no longer run the updates you need, so your apps do not always work as quickly as they should, if they work at all. Also, you have no idea what’s backed up and what isn’t. When your computer crashes, you fear you will lose everything, but you don’t have time to organize all your files and figure out how to back them up safely, so you await your doom with gritted teeth.

Solution: Buy a Mac-compatible, portable hard drive and use your computer’s Time Machine. If you don’t know how to do this, just purchase your hard drive at Costco, Staples, or Best Buy for around $60 — $100 and bring it to the school’s tech desk for a first lesson.

If using your Time Machine sounds daunting, another option is to buy a Leef flash drive. These are smaller and can still easily hold thousands of pictures or dozens of videos, creating more room for you on your laptop and making it easy for you to organize your files.

Send me word if you have other good ideas to help lighten the teaching workload. If you have a Medium account, leave your ideas right here. Otherwise, find me on Twitter @Buczinsky or through email at teri.buczinsky@d214.org.

Thanks to the many teachers who shared their ideas for this post!