82. Teach Smarter with Text Blaze as Your Time-Saving Tool with Special Guest Dan Barak

Nov 17, 2023

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If you are a teacher tired of spending endless hours on repetitive tasks and typing the same things over and over again, then hold on to your lucky flair pen because I’m giving you a simple FREE plug and play automation that you have got to start using ASAP in your classroom.

In this episode, we are diving into a game-changing tool that will rescue you from that time-sucking abyss. Join us as we chat with Dan Barak, the CEO and founder of TextBlaze, who also happens to be a former senior project manager at Google. Together, we'll explore how Textblaze can help you as a teacher reclaim your time, automate repetitive typing tasks, and improve the quality of your communications. Dan will share insights and tips on how to make the most of this powerful tool, and we'll even reveal some bonus content that you won't want to miss.

If you're ready to wave goodbye to the copy and paste vortex, and say hello to more time for teaching, inspiring, and connecting with your students, then this episode is for you.

TOPICS COVERED:

Introduction to Textblaze and how it can help automate repetitive tasks in teaching
Interview with Dan Barak, CEO and founder of Textblaze
How teachers can use Textblaze to save time and improve communication and feedback
Examples of how teachers can use Textblaze in various aspects of their work, such as writing comments, creating rubrics, and sending emails
The collaboration feature in Textblaze and how it can be used by teachers to align on shared rubrics and feedback language
The safety and security of using Textblaze, particularly in regards to student data
How to get started with Textblaze and resources available for support and inspiration
Additional features of Textblaze, such as using formulas and data to automate tasks like report card comments
Challenge for listeners to create a snippet using Textblaze and share it with the community

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE:

Get the FREE Text Blaze Chrome Extension
Library of Teacher Snippets for Use on Text Blaze
Join the Waitlist for Automate Your Classroom Course - Learn the step-by-step roadmap TO creating a sustainable teacher task simplification and automation system to beat burnout, squash stress, get back YOUR time, and sustain your career in education
Join the Waitlist for Automate Your Classroom Course - Learn the step-by-step roadmap TO creating a sustainable teacher task simplification and automation system to beat burnout, squash stress, get back YOUR time, and sustain your career in education

RELATED RESOURCES:

Teacher Email Template Toolkit - This guide will provide you with strategies for your simplifying your teacher workload and for use in your classroom. You will learn to:
- Use templates in your e-mail server
- Use swipe-copy templates to reduce the amount of time you spend writing and responding to e-mails
Take the FREE Teacher Burnout Roadmap to Burnout Recovery Quiz - Take this short, fun, and informative quiz to discover what you need to sustain your teaching career and begin burnout recovery. This quiz will help you understand what support systems you need, how to prioritize your mental health to live a fulfilling and energized life as a teacher, and what drives your self-care.
Request Professional Development from your Administrator
Interested in getting support for your school - Check out the For Schools Page
Watch the FREE "Balance before Burnout: Work/Life Balance Audit" Mini-workshop

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MORE ABOUT THE RESILIENT TEACHER PODCAST:

The Resilient Teacher Podcast is the show that will give overwhelmed educators the support, tools, and mindset to reduce teacher burnout and keep teaching sustainable. Each week, Brittany Blackwell, M.Ed. & her guests will share inspiration and actionable steps to avoid or recover from the dreaded teacher burnout. You'll be inspired to individualize self-care and learn to prioritize your well-being and mental health, all while making a bigger impact on your classrooms and community.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Introduction to the Copy and Paste Vortex

[0:00]

Do you ever find yourself stuck in this copy and paste vortex while you're teaching or while you're creating lesson plans?

Or maybe you've played the typing marathon with the same stuff over and over again, secretly, wishing for this magic shortcut.

Well, hold on to your lucky flower pen, because in this episode, we are diving into a super cool free Google Chrome extension that's about to rescue you from that time -sucking abyss.

If you've ever had your fair share of typing deja vu moments, you're in for a real treat.

Picture this, a tool that's like your trusty sidekick swooping in to save the day.

It's going to zap away those repetitive tasks, leaving you with more time to do what you do best. Teach, inspire, and connect with your kids.

[0:43]

In this episode, we are chatting with the CEO and founder of TextBlaze, Dan Baric, who also was a senior project manager at Google previously.

He and I chat about how TextBlaze can help you use your templates more effectively, automate your repetitive typing to -dos, and stick around to the end where I give you some additional ways that Dana and I didn't actually chat about as some bonus content for you. So let's jump in.

Introduction to the Systemize and Simplify series

[1:32]

Before we get into this episode, I wanted to let you know that this is the fourth installment in the Systemize and Simplify series.

And so we've gone through several challenges to get you to this point in the simplification and systemization of your classroom so you can automate and reduce that burnout and overwhelm.

If you haven't listened to the previous episodes, they are all step -by -steps to get you to this point where you're going to feel more comfortable beginning an automation system like using a plug and play tool like TextPlays, which we're talking about today.

So make sure you go back and listen to the first episodes, follow through with some action, and then come take a listen to this as we chat with Dan.

Hey, Dan, welcome to the show.

Hey, Brittany. Thanks for having me.

Yes, I think you might be the first non -teacher that I've ever had on the show, but I really fell in love with your product, TextPlays, which is your baby.

And it's something I teach teachers to use in classrooms to help automate some of their workload.

And I just knew I had to ask you to come on and chat more about it because this is just one of the simplest ways for teachers to get their time back.

So can you tell the audience a little bit about you and what Text Blaze is?

[2:39]

Sure. My name is Dan. I'm the co -founder and CEO of TextBlaze.

Before that, I worked at Google as a product manager for quite a few years.

And it was actually at Google where first I met my co -founder and CTO, Scott, and we saw firsthand the need for a tool like TextBlaze.

This is true for teachers, it's true for digital workers, anywhere, there's a lot of repetitive typing, a lot of manual work that's repetitive and low value.

[3:17]

So the goal of TextPlays is to help teachers and our users more broadly automate

How TextPlays simplifies and automates repetitive typing for teachers

[3:23]

portions of the work and eliminate repetitive typings and tasks.

And so TextPlays, what it does, it is very, very simple. it allows you to save templates of text, can be short phrases, it can be long emails or even documents, and assign keyboard shortcuts, a short phrase for those templates.

And then anywhere you go, anywhere you work, anywhere you type, if you type the keyboard shortcut, it gets replaced with the text.

And that helps eliminate repetitive typing, it helps avoid mistakes.

And for teachers, it really allows them to provide high quality feedback to students and other types of communications at a fraction of the time.

And it improves the quality of communications and feedback and it gives teachers time back.

Various ways TextPlays helps teachers reclaim their time

[4:20]

Yeah, it does. I have been using it for a while. And some of the things that I have seen, I've used email templates before, I've used different things, but rubrics and things like that, feedback that you can do, it's just, it's really transformative.

And so I would love for you to share just a couple of ways that text plays can help these teachers reclaim their time.

Absolutely. So the most basic way is when, wherever teachers find themselves typing the same things over and over again.

And so we see that in, for example, for writing comments on Google Docs, for feedback on essays or other types of work, or writing feedback in Google Classroom or whatever LMS you use, that feedback needs to be obviously very personal.

[5:14]

But the components of that personal feedback tend to be very repetitive.

[5:19]

And so as you said, teachers can save.

Rubrics can save portions of elements of feedback that they provide.

Then in real -time, when they're providing feedback for, a specific student for a specific piece of work in any of those tools, they just type the keyboard shortcuts and compose the overall message, but save time on the actual typing of that message.

That is the most basic way. Now, of course, if there's elements of repetitive typing in emails and similar forms of communication that can be helpful there as well. And it's free forever.

Advanced features of TextPlays for customizable templates and automation

[5:58]

And from there, TextPlace is also very powerful and it can be expanded.

The use can be expanded to save even more time.

So for example, these templates can be turned into reusable, customizable templates where you can add placeholders, like text boxes or dropdown menus that allow you to customize the actual text that is being typed in real time.

It can include formulas, so you can really create like a scoring rubric where you capture information for the specific student, for the specific work, and it automatically calculates the overall score.

It automatically provides references that are relevant for the feedback that you provided. it.

Textbase can also help you with...

[6:48]

Automating workflows that go a little beyond just typing, so if you need to copy data from a website and paste it in another website, TextBase can help automate that type of work as well.

Yeah, I mean, I've used it with my ChatGPT prompts.

Like, if I use a particular prompt over and over and over again, I create a shortcut really to be able to just put that prompt right into ChatGPT.

I literally type in like I have one for a lesson plan that I just use a backslash Lesson plan and when every time that I type that it just automatically populates into Chat GPT.

I've used it for Like I said rubrics things like that But there's just really a lot of ways to use it One of the other things that I have done is report card comments, which are really time -consuming Like, I know you're not a teacher.

[7:43]

But one of the things that we do is we have to write these comments on every report card.

And so having a templated response with those drop -down menus has been a huge game -changer for just being able to automate that process and make it a little personalized.

I can add a couple of little notes in there, but I don't have to type the same thing over and over.

Such -and -such is having trouble with blank, and I have a little blank spot, or I have such -and - such is really great with have a little blank spot.

And it just kind of makes the process a little simpler and keeps me reflecting on things that I can do differently.

[8:23]

So there's also an area that I know it does.

I haven't really had a chance to play around with it, but it's the Collaboration feature.

Collaboration feature in TextPlays for shared rubrics and feedback

[8:32]

Can you share a little bit about how you can collaborate?

[8:34]

Maybe as teachers, we could collaborate with our co -teachers or our teammates.

No, and that's a feature that when teachers use it...

They really see the benefit of it because it helps a department or multiple teachers within a school align on shared rubrics and shared feedback language.

[8:59]

And also save a little bit of time because you can have one teacher create the communication for the other teachers and focus on specific lesson plans and so on.

The feature is very simple. you create your own snippets and then you can share those snippets with other teachers.

You can decide whether you, you know, if you created something, you like using it and share it as viewers.

So they can just use your snippets or they can see the snippet, maybe take some inspiration for them and then, you know, either use them or create their own versions of it.

You can also share snippets with others as collaborators. And that turns those snippets similar to a shared doc, like a Google doc, where you have multiple people that can make edits to the doc.

Similarly, you have multiple teachers that collaborate on shared snippets.

And there are a lot of features to support safe collaboration, but at the end of the day, you have feedback rubrics or whatever, communication snippets that are aligned.

[10:03]

And multiple teachers are okay with them, are happy with them, and then when those teachers use them, everyone benefits because everyone can use the same language and you ensure that the quality of the communication and the language that being used is consistent across the team.

Ensuring consistent language and quality communication through collaboration

[10:23]

Yeah, so I could see that being used, like I'm a special educator, so I work with students who have individualized education plans.

And sometimes we want to use particular language and we want it to be the same throughout the district or throughout the school.

And so I can see me using that or sharing those or collaborating with other teachers to really have that same language populated throughout all of our education plans.

So I really, really like that feature a lot.

And I know that there's at least one teacher out there. There is at least one there is wondering, you know, how safe is it to use this extension?

Because it's all it is is an extension that you then populate into your Google Chrome, where it just automatically is used throughout your email service provider or whatever website you're on.

So what could you say to that teacher who's a little maybe apprehensive about using it?

Addressing concerns about the safety and privacy of using TextPlays

[11:20]

So first of all, I appreciate any teacher who is concerned about the safety of, your student data. Our user data safety is our top priority.

[11:33]

There is nothing to worry about in that regard when using text plays.

And the reason is simple.

The only thing we have access to as text plays is those snippets, those templates that you save.

Now those are by definition reusable pieces of text, they don't contain any student -specific information.

When you use the snippets, when you use the keyboard shortcut and they get replaced with the text, even if they include placeholders, where you might be typing the student name or their scores, all of the processing, the inserting of the snippet or template is done locally on the user's machine and never leaves the user.

So as text plays, that information, where the snippet was used, what was the text that was actually inserted eventually, what was the text that was typed into form fields, that information never leaves the user computer.

It never reaches us as text plays. And of course, we don't collect any of it because we have no visibility into it.

And so in that regard, perfectly safe. Now, the information that we do have access to, like the reusable templates, we also use all the best practices to keep them very secure.

We're audited by a third party to make sure that we are actually keeping that data secure.

Importance of Data Security and FERPA Compliance

[13:01]

Yeah, I really like that, too, because when we're teachers and we're using this information, we want to make sure that we're using it safely and keeping that information secure.

Because our students, we are required by FERPA in America for making sure that that student data is secure, is safe, all of that.

And so I appreciate you being transparent about how those things are used, because I know there was at least one teacher out there that was curious.

I know I was a little bit curious at first too. So for teachers who are just getting started, you know, using TextBlaze, they're super intrigued about it.

What's the best way for a teacher to get started using it? Go to Blazeda today, our website.

There's a big blue button that says install the extension.

[13:50]

We'll take you to the Chrome Web Store and allow you to install the extension.

And then create your first snippet. You know, the one that I use most regularly is a simple sentence that says, please let me know if you have any questions.

So think about phrases that you find yourself using repetitively.

Try to use it anywhere on the web, see it in action.

From there, I'm sure that whoever's using it will come up with many, many other ideas to save time using TextBase.

So after you started using it, you start saving time, you see the value of it, please reach out to us and let us know what's the best way for us to support you.

There's a lot that TextBase can do, as we've talked about before, and we're here to support teachers along that journey. So, you know, feel free to email us if you want us to come in, do a training for your school or your school district.

[14:39]

Help you implement more advanced snippets, let us know how we can help.

Our goal is to see our users succeed.

Utilizing TextBlaze's Snippet Libraries and Community Support

[14:49]

Another part that I'm going to put in there too, about your snippets library.

You have different snippet libraries, not just for teachers, but for other areas too.

There's a whole section in there just for educators, and I found the most inspiration.

[15:05]

Now, I don't use all of them, but I use a lot of them for inspiration to think, okay, how could I use this tool more effectively?

What are some ways that I could use it?

And it's just phenomenal that those are available and you can copy them right into your extension so that you don't even have to think about it.

So I thought that was really cool and I will definitely put the link for that in the show notes as well.

And thanks for pointing out our gallery of examples and that's the purpose of them to provide inspiration. We also have a community of users on our website that's very active and likes to help each other.

So I encourage people to try our community forum as well.

Yes, absolutely. And I'll put those links in the show notes as well.

Thank you so much, Dan, for coming on to the show, just sharing a little bit about TextBlaze and all of that, because I know that it's a huge time saver for teachers and your product is just amazing. So thank you again for coming on to the show.

Thanks for having me. I should have pointed out earlier, both my mother and Scott's mother there are teachers. Oh wow!

Seeing teachers benefit from TextBlaze has been really great.

[16:17]

And thanks for having me and helping promote TextBlaze for more teachers. Absolutely.

So while Dan and I chatted about the functionality of TextBlaze, since our recording, I've actually been playing around with it in more ways to automate using the extension.

And I am amazed at some of the new developments just since we recorded.

While we talked a lot about that repetitive typing, there are some other features that I think will really help you as you begin using it as well.

Obviously, I think you should start with automating with that text input part, but you can also use things like formulas, you can use data, and even clicking.

Picture this, okay? It's report card season. There's this one comment that you need to enter for a bunch of students, and now doing it manually would be like a never -ending click fest. You know the drill.

You click on the student's name, you click in the comment field, Do you type or paste that same old comment?

Then you click save and submit. Rinse and repeat for every student in your class.

And that's exhausting, right?

But here is where you can use TextBlaze to step in.

With TextBlaze, you can create a little magical shortcut. Say it's like CC for common comment.

[17:28]

And when you're in your grade book, instead of going on a clicking spree, you just type in CC and boom.

TextBlaze swings into action. it can click on the comment field, it can paste that common comment, snip it, and then it can hit save or submit.

[17:44]

And then you move on to the next student with a couple of CC keystrokes.

You see what happened there?

You saved a whole bunch of time and you kept those grade comments consistent, all while having a little bit of fun using the Chrome extension.

[17:55]

You can use this cool hack for all sorts of tasks like form filling, giving feedback, navigating those online teaching platforms.

The possibilities are endless and it's super simple.

So I'm putting a little tutorial video inside of the episode show notes at teachingmindbodyandsoul .com slash episode 82.

For those of you who are in the Automate Your Classroom program, you have access to more videos like this inside of the Automation Tech Vault in the Plug and Play section in TextBlaze Lesson.

By automating clicking, typing, and data with TextBlaze, you are the teacher with the time -saving superpower and you can focus on what truly matters.

This is the perfect time of the year for this series and we have quite a few more episodes so I can't wait to get you started using more automations for your teacher task and reduce that overwhelm.

Your challenge for this episode is to create a snippet in the free text plays extension and you can share it over in the resilient teacher community so that we can create a list of snippets that some of us maybe can use or Customize to save us more time I hope you found some value out of this episode and if you have a teacher friend who you know is struggling with the daily To do's wasting a lot of time Please do share this episode with them Grab the link send it to them in a text or share it on your socials because I would love to have them take a listen as well.

My goal is to be here to support you and to help you beat the teacher burnout cycle once and for all.

Don't forget, you are a resilient teacher. We're in this together. You got this.

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