10 Things Educators Shouldn’t Be Doing Manually in 2026

IMAGO

Sep 17, 2026 • 8 min read

Teaching has always involved more work than what happens in front of the classroom. A teacher may spend the morning preparing a lesson, the afternoon answering questions and checking student work, and the evening catching up on administrative tasks that have little to do with actually teaching. As schools continue to adopt more digital tools, AI platforms, connected devices, and learning technologies, educators should ask an important question: are we actually making teaching easier, or are we simply adding more technology to an already busy workload?

The reality is that technology has the potential to remove some of the repetitive work educators deal with every day. At the same time, technology can create new layers of work when teachers have to move between multiple platforms, repeat the same processes, or manually manage an ever-growing collection of digital tools and devices. The goal, therefore, should not be to automate teaching itself. It should be to identify the tasks that consume time without requiring the uniquely human skills that make a great educator.

So, as we move further into 2026, here are 10 things educators should start thinking twice about doing manually.

1. Creating Every Lesson Resource From a Blank Page

Lesson planning will always require a teacher's knowledge, creativity, and understanding of their students. But that does not mean every worksheet, activity, quiz, discussion question, or supporting resource needs to begin with a completely blank document. For educators, teaching multiple classes or subjects, recreating similar materials week after week can quickly become one of those invisible tasks that consumes far more time than expected.

Today, digital tools and AI can help teachers get past the starting point much faster. A teacher can use technology to brainstorm lesson ideas, generate question variations, structure an activity, adapt an explanation for different levels, or turn existing material into a new format. The teacher remains responsible for reviewing the content, checking accuracy, and making sure it actually works for their students, but they no longer have to spend the same amount of time simply getting started.

This is an important distinction when thinking about AI in education. The goal is not to have technology teach the class. The goal is to allow teachers to spend less time on repetitive preparation and more time thinking about how their students will actually learn.

2. Repeating the Same Instructions Over and Over Again

Every teacher knows this situation. You explain the assignment, someone asks what they are supposed to do, you explain it again, and five minutes later another student asks the exact same question. Some repetition is naturally part of teaching, especially when students need clarification, but not every piece of routine information needs to be communicated manually every single time.

Digital learning platforms, shared resources, classroom systems, and automated reminders can help make standard information available when students need it. Assignment instructions, deadlines, resources, schedules, and frequently used materials can be organized in a way that students can access independently instead of relying entirely on the teacher to repeat the information.

3. Building Every Assessment From Scratch

Creating meaningful assessments takes expertise. Teachers need to understand what they want students to demonstrate, how difficult a question should be, and whether an assessment accurately reflects the learning objective. However, there is a difference between designing an assessment and manually producing every single variation of it.

For example, a teacher may have a set of questions covering a particular topic and need additional practice questions for students who require more support. Another group may need more challenging questions. Creating every variation manually can take considerable time, particularly when the teacher is working across multiple classes.

Technology can help educators create a starting point for these variations, whether that means generating additional questions, creating different formats, or adapting existing material. The teacher should still review and refine the output before it reaches students. The value is not in removing the teacher from the process, but in reducing the amount of repetitive work required to produce useful learning materials.

4. Spending Hours on Repetitive Feedback

Feedback is one of the most important parts of learning, but giving useful feedback is also one of the most time-consuming parts of teaching. When a teacher is reviewing dozens of assignments, they may find themselves writing similar comments repeatedly: explain this point further, provide an example, review your calculation, check your grammar, or revisit this section.

Technology can help educators identify recurring issues and create a starting point for feedback, allowing teachers to focus their attention where it is most valuable. Instead of spending the same amount of time writing essentially the same comment for every student, teachers can use digital tools to support the more repetitive aspects while retaining control over the final feedback.

That human element matters. A useful piece of feedback is not simply a correction. It should help a student understand what they did well, where they can improve, and what they should do next. Technology can assist with the process, but teachers remain essential in understanding the student behind the work.

5. Entering the Same Information Into Multiple Systems

One of the most frustrating parts of working in a digital environment is having to enter the same information more than once. A teacher may update a spreadsheet, record information in a school system, upload it to another platform, and then send the same information through email or another communication channel.

Each individual action might seem insignificant. The problem is what happens when these small tasks accumulate across an entire term. Five minutes here and ten minutes there can eventually become hours spent moving information from one place to another instead of working directly with students.

As schools become increasingly digital, integration should become just as important as functionality. Having more technology does not necessarily mean having a better workflow. The better solution is an ecosystem in which systems can work together and information does not have to be repeatedly recreated simply because it exists in different places.

6. Searching for the Same Teaching Resources Again and Again

Teachers spend a surprising amount of time looking for things they have already created or used before. A presentation may be buried in an old folder, a useful worksheet may be sitting in an email attachment, and the perfect activity might exist somewhere on a laptop that has not been opened since last semester.

Over time, this creates a different kind of workload. Instead of creating new content, teachers are spending time trying to find old content.

A more effective digital workflow is to treat teaching resources as a reusable library rather than a collection of one-off files. Materials can be organized by subject, topic, year level, learning objective, or type of activity, making it easier to find and adapt them when they are needed again. A resource that took an hour to create should not become an hour-long search the next time you need it.

The objective is simple: create once, organize well, and improve over time.

7. Manually Sending Every Routine Reminder

Teachers communicate with students, parents, colleagues, administrators, and sometimes entire departments. Not every message requires the same level of personal attention. A conversation about a student's progress obviously requires human judgment, but a reminder about a deadline or an upcoming event may not.

This is where automation can quietly make a difference. Routine reminders, announcements, schedules, and standard information can often be delivered through digital platforms without requiring teachers to manually send the same message repeatedly.

The important thing is not to automate communication for the sake of automation. It is to distinguish between communication that requires a relationship and communication that simply requires consistency. When technology can handle the second category, teachers have more time for the first.

8. Physically Managing Every Classroom Device

Now consider another part of the modern classroom that often gets overlooked: the technology itself.

Interactive displays, smartboards, computers, and other connected classroom devices have become increasingly common in education. But as the number of devices grows, so does the challenge of managing them. A school with one smartboard has one device to think about. A school with dozens of classrooms may have dozens of devices that need to be monitored, maintained, updated, or managed.

This is where the idea of centralized device management becomes increasingly important. Instead of treating every device as a completely separate piece of technology, schools can use management platforms that give administrators greater visibility and control from a central location.

For example, IMAGO Proctor provides centralized management for connected IMAGO devices. One of its capabilities is the Send Command feature, which allows administrators to send supported commands to managed smartboards through the platform rather than relying entirely on manual, device-by-device processes.

9. Recreating Resources That Already Exist

There is another form of manual work that educators often overlook: recreating something that already exists.

A teacher may have a presentation from last year but rebuild it from scratch because the original file is difficult to find. They may have a worksheet that could be adapted for a new class but create an entirely new one instead. They may have an activity that worked well but never document what made it successful.

Digital teaching should not be about creating more and more content. It should also be about making existing content easier to reuse.

A well-organized digital resource library can allow educators to build on their previous work rather than starting over. Materials can be updated as curriculum requirements change, improved based on student feedback, and adapted for different classes.

Over time, this creates something much more valuable than a folder full of files. It creates an evolving teaching system that becomes more useful with every semester.

10. Spending Your Best Time on Work That Does Not Require You

Perhaps the most important question educators can ask in 2026 is not simply, “What can technology automate?” but “What should I be spending my time on?”

There are parts of teaching that technology can support, but there are also parts that technology should never be expected to replace. Building relationships with students, understanding when someone is struggling, motivating a disengaged learner, managing a classroom, encouraging curiosity, explaining a difficult concept in a different way, and making professional judgments all depend heavily on the human side of education.

That is precisely why repetitive work deserves closer attention.

If an educator is spending valuable time performing a predictable task that can be simplified, automated, centralized, or supported by technology, that is time that could potentially be redirected toward students.

The objective is not to make teachers work faster so they can fit even more work into their day. It is to remove unnecessary friction from the work they already have.

The Goal Is Not to Automate Teachers

There is an important difference between automating teaching and automating tasks around teaching. The first raises legitimate concerns about the role of educators and the human connection at the heart of education. The second can help protect that human connection by reducing the amount of repetitive work surrounding it.

Technology should not decide how a teacher connects with a student, whether a particular learner needs additional support, or what makes a lesson meaningful. Those decisions require context, experience, empathy, and professional judgment. Technology can, however, help with the repetitive processes that sit around those decisions.

That distinction will become increasingly important as AI, connected devices, digital learning platforms, and automation become more common in schools. The question should not be whether educators should use more technology. The better question is whether the technology they are using is actually removing friction from their day.

The Future of Education Technology Should Feel Simpler

The most useful education technology may not always be the tool with the longest feature list. Sometimes, its greatest value is much simpler: it removes a task that someone previously had to do manually.

For educators, that could mean spending less time creating repetitive resources, searching through old files, entering the same information into multiple systems, or managing routine technology tasks.

For schools, it could mean building a more connected and manageable technology environment where administrators have greater visibility and control over the devices deployed across classrooms. And for teachers, the benefit is ultimately measured in something much more valuable than clicks or commands: time.