Before your first week of school gets going, build your entire email system once so it just works every year after. This episode covers how to set up a class email group in Gmail and Outlook, the one privacy rule every teacher needs to know about Bcc, and five ready-to-use email templates for the first month of school.

Links Mentioned:

• Back-to-School Email Templates (free copy)
• Your Back-to-School Email Setup Guide (PDF)
• Teacher Systems Lab GPT - $37

Visit my website: www.thattechsavvyteacher.com

One simple question decides whether something in my classroom gets a name or a number, and it's saved me hours of relabeling every single year. In this episode, I walk through how I decide what's worth building into a reusable system and what's faster to just remake.

Full show notes (recap + key takeaways + resource):
The biggest question I get asked is whether I remember every student's name. The truth is I remember my students, I just don't always remember their names right away, and that's part of what led me to the system in this episode.

Before I label anything in my classroom, I stop and ask one question: how long am I actually going to be using this? That single question changes how I set up everything, whether you're teaching 800 kids like me or the same 25 kids all day.

In this episode I cover: why names go on personal things like desks and name tags but numbers go on anything with a long shelf life like cubbies, folders, and login systems; why I keep one lesson plan per grade level instead of one per class, and how I handle differentiation separately (including for IEPs and 504s); why some things, like my second graders' printed login cards, are faster to just remake every week than to build a system to store them; and how this same principle shows up in how I share materials weekly and in my class website.

Resources mentioned:

• Full Episode Notes PDF
• Google Sites Made Simple

You don't need a finished plan before you talk to AI, you need a wish. In this episode, I walk through how a sub plan that builds itself and a mouse practice activity for my youngest students both started as nothing more than a sentence I said out loud. The real shift wasn't the tools, it was learning to ask AI to show me how instead of asking it to just do it for me.

I also talk about what changed once my role grew from one classroom to 42, why I now go to AI before I go looking for a tutorial when I hit a wall in a spreadsheet, and how I use AI to help colleagues solve their own problems instead of creating more dependence on me.

Free Download: Your AI Wish List

Simple things to try building this week, plus where to start (ChatGPT, Claude, SchoolAI, and MagicSchool).

Mentioned in This Episode

Teacher Systems Lab, my custom GPT for teachers, $37, available inside the free version of ChatGPT.
learn.thattechsavvyteacher.com/products/digital_downloads/teacher-systems-lab