Two Ways to Automate Your Teaching Life

As a teacher, your time is precious. Time saved in your teaching tasks can be better used elsewhere in the classroom.  There are two apps that can save you time while helping you get stuff done.  For iOS and Android, there's IFTTT (If This Then That) and Shortcuts, an iOS exclusive.  They both essentially automate tasks, combining different functions, therefore saving you time and helping you get more done.

IFTTT is reactive in that if you initiate a task, then it will initiate another.  For example, if a new photo is taken on Instagram, the image will also be tweeted to the users Twitter account, therefore saving you the step of opening Twitter and tweeting the picture.  If you have a file you want to sync to Dropbox, IFTTT gives you the ability to also save those files to Google Drive, therefore automating the tasks.  If you want to make sure and not miss an email attachment, you can configure IFTTT to save your email attachments to your Drive or Dropbox.  There are countless ways to use IFTTT in your teaching life.  Simply open up the app and explore the countless ways you can find it useful in getting things done all the while saving you time.

The Shortcuts app is only available on iOS.  It's kinda the same idea as IFTTT in that it can automate your workflow (which is what Shortcuts was previously called).  But with Shortcuts, you create an action by adding different apps together to automate a task and get it done quickly.  For example, I created a shortcut where I can enter text, which creates a PDF, and asks me where I want to save the PDF, either to iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or Google's Drive.  As a teacher, I find this handy if you'd like to create a quick PDF and share it with your students through Google Classroom or any other LMS.  Like IFTTT, the Shortcuts app has a gallery from which you can choose already make workflows.

You owe it to yourself to check these out.  But don't get overwhelmed by the number of tasks that they offer.  Start out finding one or two things you do often that you'd like to automate, especially with Shortcuts.  Then, venture further and create your own Shortcuts.