How To Work Less As A Teacher Online

Learn about how you can work less as an online teacher and 11 tips to reduce online teacher workload and get some time for yourself as an online teacher.

Now that all of us are staying at home for one reason or another but, we share one common dilemma; Covid19.

There are so many professions that have been converted into an online business, especially teaching.

Online teaching existed even before this shared dilemma but, people did not encourage the good side of it on a larger scale.

Teachers now especially know about the flexibility and authenticity of online teaching.

However, online teaching doesn’t come without it’s own share of challenging.

Just like teachers in traditional classroom, online teachers can end up overworking.

The problem is that having a lot of things to do can lead to ineficieny or burnout.

That’s why as an online teacher, you should find out how you can manage your workload.

In this article, we share some tips that you can use to reduce your workload while accomplishing the most important task – teaching.

We are about to tell you mind-blowing strategies about how you can be a great teacher online but also save time for yourself daily.

Table of Contents:

How To Work Less As A Teacher Online:

So, let us start!

1. Set Clear Goals

Online teaching is going to be the new normal for the whole world, it is a fact.

That is why all of us need to set our goals and aims of learning according to online classes and education.

Online learning does not only belong to schools, colleges, or universities, in fact, it has jumped in the realm of every profession now.

For instance:

Videography
Fitness program courses
Advance essay writing courses
Baking
Psychology 101

There are several options and fields for you to choose from.

Select wisely among the choices you have, to select your strongest pursuit.

So now, when we know that there are various courses available online and this is going to be our new normal, we should set our goals and aims according to this criterion.

Note: Think of a particular task through which you want to achieve a distinct goal.

Select a direction in which you want to move forward to reach your goal.

Prioritizing your goals in your mind first is essential.

Different types of online courses can include different sorts of goals.

2. Focus On Your Strengths

As psychology says, we should focus on our strong points instead of the shortcomings to move forward with motivation, we recommend you the same.

Every person has their strong points in front of their mind, you also know yours.

Do not focus on your weak points as this habit discourages.

Your strengths can be, for example:

Communication skills
Public motivational speaking
Your fitness routine and plan
Being organized in your thoughts & household stuff
Mathematics (or any subject/discipline you used to ace while studying.)
Anxiety relief therapy
Computer genius

Anything which you prefer about yourself can become the course you are going to sell online.

3. It’s Not About Perfectionism, It’s About Longevity

If you think that teaching online is a game of perfection, then you are wrong!

Let us guide you that people who start their work from the perspective of getting merely towards perfection, often lose their hope.

Why?

Because it is in human nature to not get easily satisfied with yourself, no matter what level of perfection you are at.

Starting your own business with this mind frame can hurt you and the outcomes which you are probably going to get in the beginning might not satisfy you at all.

What remains behind is your hard work and passion.

Persistence and hard work is the only key which is going to take you to the levels you never imagined.

You just have to keep on moving forward with optimism and hard work, because they pay off good in return.

So, decide before starting your project what standard of quality is acceptable to you relating your work and what isn’t.

It will make you move easily in the right direction.

4. Set Priorities

Setting your priorities straight simply means doing what is more important and cutting those things out of your workload which is not necessary for an online teacher.

Do not burden yourself with extra activities that are not going to benefit you in the long run.

Stay focused!

The more you know on what thing you have to focus on, the easier and less load of work is going to be for you.

Just take it this way that when you are working at an institution to teach, there are so many tasks for you to do.

For example, clerical duties or extensive paper checking, keeping up with long hours, etc.

But here you are your boss, just move accordingly and care only about your learners and audience, focus on them.

This is the best chance for you to improvise your lessons and be the teacher you always wanted to be.

Your only responsibility here is your students.

5. Schedule Time For School Work

While working long and complex hours at your workplace everybody gets tired, that’s not a new thing to talk about but what is quite catchy here?

The thing that while teaching online you do not have to be working all the time.

In fact, by organizing your work hours and work tasks you can have lots of free time to yourself daily.

No matter how good you are at work, everybody tends to make mistakes without having a good rest.

That is why we say that online teaching is a business and a job that is not as tiring as regular jobs.

Do some self-evaluation and make sure that you do not make the same mistakes again and again, this habit of yours will let a whole lot of steam off of you.

Remember that by organizing and fixing your daily hours to your work and you will make your life easier and your work interesting.

6. Don’t Make Every Material From Scratch

The biggest duty and most important ethic which any online teacher has, is devoting your time and yourself to your learners.

That is why, we advise it, again and again, to leave unnecessary things behind and connect with your students more.

For instance, if you want to create a few interesting activities for your online classes or invent new worksheets, it’s going to be hard for you.

Not that doing honest work is a bad thing, it is great but if you will go invent new tasks and activities for them for each lesson, it will make you slower and you have to put long tiring hours in it.

There is no shame in using some previous ideas for activities if they were working fine in the past.

You can always ask your students to come up with new ideas for your lessons, it will make your work easier and keep them interested in their classes.

This way they will know they can’t sit brain-dead during the lessons and they have to come up with ideas which you can ask anytime.

7. Use Technology To Your Advantage

Using technology to your advantage, for your online lessons, can save you a ton of time.

Empower your students by self-directed learning via carefully curated resources and networks.

Now what you can do is see patterns in student errors through data analysis.

Create a type of quiz which grades itself.

Send voice feedback to your students.

We also advise you 5 best online tools:

Evernote

It is an electronic notebook on which you can create notes, organize your work on it, put tags, and create different files.

Dropbox:

Signing up for a basic account, you get 2 GB free space which you can use on your Windows, Mac laptop or Computer, Android, iOS, or even Windows mobile phones.

Mailbox:

Mailbox is Dropbox’s mail client and that is how you can link both apps, by setting reminders for your emails to send them to your students.

Documents To Go:

It is a paid app, which allows teachers to view, edit, and continuously work on documents, either from your mobile phone or laptop, thus doing work on the go.

Remind:

On it, teachers can set out reminders via text messages to send to your students or parents about homework, class activities, or other important events, making no room for excuses.

8. Delegate And Empower Students To Do Things On Their Own

‘Delegate’ and ‘Empower’ are such teaching strategies through which you can save your time and efforts.

By delegating proper tasks to suitable students you can increase the capacity of students while saving time.

For instance, ‘Delegate’ the making of study cards or creation of updates of homework folders, editing, uploading, and tagging of videos for a flipped classroom, maintenance of the class website.

Take it as dividing the burden.

Use social media to inform your students about different activities or upcoming tests.

It eases off the pain and tight schedule of lessons.

Assign them projects which they can assess themselves.

Inform them about a grading criterion so they can benefit from it before-hand and complete their assignments according to the criterion.

You can share apps through an iCloud account.

Empowering specifically means a smarter teaching system.

Work in such ways that can make your work easier instead of wasting your time on non-necessary tasks.

9. Automate Grading

Automate grading seems the best professional and easy option for busy teachers out there.

It makes their work easy.

The technology aggregates the data better and humans often do poor jobs, especially when tired, processing large amounts of information.

That is why you need to have the right technology for the right choice of work.

It can organize the information in a way that will make sense to you in the long run.

Particularly with graphs and visualizations.

Teachers do not prefer grading multiple choices or fill-in-the-blank questions by hand.

They know that it would take them too long and it would become hectic for them

They add it all up and figure out that if one student got 80% right and another 95%, so, the collective average of the whole class is 88%.

They use google form, it shows them what percentage of students got each question right.

10. Plan For The Entire Unit

There are many kinds of teachers out there; one who does not like to do lesson planning, then one who plans their lessons weekly, then comes the one who tries to plan their lessons two weeks in advance.

This makes their two weeks go like a breeze.

Amazed enough?

Then you should know this too, there are also a few teachers who plan the entire year.

Now, this is the most amazing!

Imagine how much stress-free their whole year must go by.

That is why, we advise you to plan your whole sessions, not in detail, but if you know your content well enough then it will hardly take you one hour to plan it.

How does this sound?

It makes us feel stressfree and so should you!

The best thing about this strategy is, you can focus on where you students need to ‘get to’ instead of what you need to ‘get through’.

This makes so much sense to us, doesn’t it?

11. Prioritize Your Health

Now the last most important straw of these strategies is, which we also care about, your health and your healthy routine.

It is this point, due to which we wrote a whole article for you.

We care about you and so should you care too, about yourself.

A well-rested mind and body are better than the mind and body which is caffeine-dependent.

You are the better judge of yourself, you know yourself better but, all human bodies are made in the same way.

They need food, rest, relaxation, and also a little me time.

A fatigued mind and body can get you nowhere, for sure.

If you think that while staying busy all week, you can give your body full rest during the weekend, then you are completely wrong.

You cannot get your body to work according to you when you have disturbed all the balance between your mind and body.

Your body needs a complete balance to support your mind.

Conclusion

So that’s all lovely teachers!

We hope you found this article helpful and it motivated you enough to get that special me time which you have been craving for so long!

Let us know in the comments!

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