According to the National Council on Teacher Quality (2012), the average teacher in the United States gets 45 minutes of planning time per day. If a teacher has five classes, that gives them just 9 minutes per class to create an engaging lesson that meets the needs of every student in the room.

Needless to say, educators don’t have nearly enough time to plan lessons. The easiest solution to this problem would be to give teachers more prep time. However, as that seems unlikely to happen, here are six ways that teachers can use edtech tools to save time.

1. Find a learning management system that works for you
Learning management systems such as Google Classroom, Schoology, or Seesaw can drastically cut down on the time needed to assign in-class work or homework. With just a few clicks, a teacher can push out an assignment to all of their students instead of having to waste time at the printer. Each learning management system operates a little differently, so you should experiment with a couple of them to see which one works for
you.

2. Auto-grading assignments
A report by Scholastic (2012) states that the average teacher spends 90 minutes a day grading at home. Thankfully, there are plenty of websites that offer auto-grading assignments such as Nearpod, Google Forms, or Quizlet. These websites are easy to use and even generate graphs to provide you with data on how well your students did on each assignment. Less time spent on grading means more time to look at assessment data to determine what your students need to cover in their next lesson.