Most teachers think their organization problems are a personal failure. They're not. You don't need more motivation, you need one good system.

In this episode, Alison tells the story of the very first system that ever ran her classroom, built by her parents at their kitchen table with a piece of paper and a pencil. She breaks down why the fix was never about trying harder, and walks through exactly how to find your own biggest time drain and build one simple system to solve it for good.

Grab the free guide that goes with this episode here, and try the one exercise Alison shares at the end before next Tuesday.

Most teachers use Google Forms to check for understanding after a lesson. In this episode, Alison Howd shows how to make the form the lesson itself.

She walks through a real research project she built for third grade: students watch a short embedded video, then branch into different sections based on an animal they pick, each one linking to real research questions. Built once, it now runs for a new group of students every year with about five minutes of updates.

You'll learn the two rules that make a form reusable year after year (never put the year in the title, and always track which class a response came from), plus how to set up branching logic in Google Forms step by step.

Subscribe so you don't miss next Tuesday, and visit thattechsavvyteacher.com for the free resources linked below.

Build a Google Form That Teaches Itself (free guide)
Teacher Systems Lab

In this first episode of The Time-Saving Teacher, host Alison Howd shares why she believes in working really hard to be lazy, and what that actually means for a classroom teacher. After 25 years in education and teaching technology to over 800 students across 42 classes, Alison has learned that most teachers aren't missing effort, they're missing systems.

She shares two real examples that changed how she works: embedding Google Slides into her school's learning management system so lesson plans update themselves, and using short videos instead of phone calls and long emails to communicate with parents. Both ideas came from somewhere else first. She just tried them, then shared what worked.

This episode sets up what to expect every Tuesday: ten minutes, one practical idea, one system or tool you can use right away. Some weeks it's Google tools. Some weeks it's AI. Every week it's something real.

Alison also introduces Teacher Systems Lab, her custom GPT built specifically for teachers and anyone who works in a school, available inside ChatGPT's free version for $37.

Subscribe so you don't miss a Tuesday episode, and visit thattechsavvyteacher.com for the free resources linked below.

Teacher Systems Lab
Free resource for this episode