I have a challenge for you.

Open your laptop. Open the folder where you keep your school documents. Look at the last 10 files you worked on.

How many of them were creative lesson plans? And how many were lists of names, attendance records, or exam marks that you had to manually calculate?

If you are like most teachers in Nepal, the “Admin Beast” is eating your creativity alive.

The goal of technology isn't to make you work harder, but to make your work flow.

The “Teacher Developer” Approach to Data

In my previous post about the AI Co-Teacher, I talked about adopting a developer mindset.

A core principle of software development is DRY: Don’t Repeat Yourself.

If you are writing the same list of student names every Monday morning, you are violating the DRY principle. If you are manually adding up marks with a calculator and typing the total into another column, you are doing work a machine can do in milliseconds.

3 Simple Automations for Nepali Teachers

You don’t need to know Python to automate your classroom. You just need Google Sheets and Google Forms.

1. The Self-Checking Quiz

The Old Way: Print 40 copies of a test. Students write answers. You spend your Saturday night looking at paper with a red pen. The Smart Way: Create a Google Form. Turn on “Make this a quiz” in Settings. Assign point values. The Result: Students get their marks instantly. You get a breakdown of which questions were the hardest.

2. The Attendance Tracker

Instead of a paper register, create a simple Google Form with a dropdown of student names (or just check boxes). Bookmark it on your phone. Walk into class, tap the names of absent students, and hit submit. Pro Tip: Connect this form to a Google Sheet. Use a pivot table to instantly see attendance % for every student at the end of the month. No manual counting required.

3. The “Ledger-to-Report Card” Generator

This is where the magic happens. Most schools in Nepal use complex Excel ledgers. But often, creating the individual marksheet for the student is a manual copy-paste job. The Fix: Use the VLOOKUP function. Create a “Master Sheet” with all marks. Create a “Report Card Template” in another tab. Use VLOOKUP to pull data based on the Roll Number. Change the Roll Number, and the whole report card updates.

Why This Matters

When you spend 3 hours grading quizzes, you are tired. You are irritable. You don’t have energy for that student who needs extra help. When you automate that work, you buy back your patience. You buy back your passion.

Your Homework

This week, pick one paper form you hate filling out. Can it be a Google Form? If you’re not sure how, search for “Google Forms tutorial” on YouTube, or ask your new friend, ChatGPT.

Automate the boring. Teach the interesting.