Rest and Tech: Taking Advantage of Modern Tech For Educator Relaxation

We often say learning shouldn’t be limited to the four corners of the classroom, but it can be argued that teaching shouldn’t exactly be confined to the same four walls, either. Teachers unfortunately don’t get enough credit for what we do for your students – especially how you need to keep up with the pace of tech today, more often than not allotting your personal time into creating informative and entertaining teaching materials. However! As educators, we shouldn’t overestimate our capacity to teach, and we should always find ways to get adequate rest.

“What rest?” you might ask, pointing at various laptops and teaching paraphernalia you’ll have to modify and tailor for your students’ needs. It’s understandably difficult to take rest when work seems to creep up on you whenever you have tech with you – which is all the time. Did you know you can incorporate tech into your resting periods, though? That’s right, it’s about time we also pay attention to your health – and these are the best tech to do it:

Resting for Teachers: A Serious Case of Burning Out

Employee burnout remains a big problem in modern workplaces, especially given the pressure given to workers to compete and adapt to the rise of automation and AI. This is all the more compounded for teachers and educators, as we need to comprehend materials enough to be able to teach them to students. And not a lot of teachers get the right compensation for such efforts. Unfortunately, this can lead to teacher burnout – a situation extremely disadvantageous for students worldwide.

Teacher burnout, especially given demands to adjust teaching strategies with regards to development in tech, can pose a real problem for modern schools.

In fact, in a study, it’s been revealed that burnout is highly infectious. Teachers have higher chances of experiencing burnout when they see their formal mentors and close colleagues being burnt out as well. While some look at the problem of educator burnout as an “individual” thing, it’s perhaps important to look at it in such a way that one teacher being burnt out means something is wrong with the system. And before burnout happens to us while we’re in the heat of being passionate with our teachings, we should find better ways for relaxation.

And if we want to maintain our love for teaching, we’ve got to be smarter in taking breaks. If you feel the presence of tech is pressuring you into working again, then you might want to use some of the things we’ve found to your advantage.

Tech for Rest for Teachers: Tech Tips To Get Educators Much-Deserved R&R

Given the real problem with regards to teaching workload and working motivation, it seems we’re just waiting for a proverbial time bomb to go off and for us to forget teaching entirely. Fortunately, this shouldn’t necessarily be the case. You can use tech to take full advantage of your rest days, and here’s what you can do with existing tech today:

• Build your relaxation mecca in the faculty room. If you’re assigned a cubicle in your faculty room, you can actually take advantage of your space to build your own rest and relaxation zone. Assuming you’re allowed to tinker with your cubicle layout and the furniture in there (e.g. your chair) you can optimize your faculty room cubicle with an assortment of gadgets, furniture, and tools that can help you get much-needed rest and sleep without having to leave the school or risk losing sight of your responsibilities.
  • You can rely on accessories such as diffusers to give yourself a relaxing and calm atmosphere. You can put things like aroma diffusers in the office or in your room at home to help you calm down with essential oils and good lighting.
  • Tools like head massagers and ball rollers can help you give yourself a quick massage without hassling yourself to go to the massage parlor or spa. These tools are extremely handy, and can be bought and stored in faculty areas or at home.
  • Sleep easier with perfumes and sprays that give pillows and your room a fragrance that helps you prepare for a few hours’ of much-needed sleep. This helps your body relax and calm down as you lie down and prepare for a long and fun day of teaching ahead. Some tools also provide calm music or static noise to help the mind relax and get you sleeping.

• Create your ideal R&R destination right at your fingertips. Who says you need to be at home to relax? Thanks to advancements in technology today, you can have different apps and programs installed in your various devices to help you, encourage you, and to remind you to take rest. These come in the form of meditation apps, spiritual guides, mobile journals, and even wellness apps you can actively engage and interact with right on your fingertips. Handling your health while teaching has never been easier thanks to these tools.
  • Smartphones and other gadgets actually enable and encourage healthcare to its users, given there’s actually more than 300,000 mobile health apps in major app stores for us to use. A study from the Pew Research Center cited that 62-percent of smartphone users use their devices to gather information related to health. And physicians also use their smartphones at work.
  • If you want to try out some yoga or meditation, there are actually a ton of apps you can use. You can tailor your meditation specifically to your needs with apps like Calm, Headspace, and Inscape. These apps have the option to let you choose a particular “purpose” and they have meditation sessions prepared just for you. This is helpful especially if you have a faculty room lounge you can use to meditate for a few minutes a day, or even before and after you sleep at home.
  • When we say R&R, we don’t necessarily just mean “rest.” We also need to take into account your physical and mental health as well. Apps like Symple Symptom Tracker or Drugs.com Medication Guide can help you take a closer look into your eating and sleeping habits, and give you comprehensive information medicine you take, respective. MyFitnessPal and Samsung Health can also help you pay closer attention to your fitness.

• Take advantage of automation, smart tools to speed up workflow and increase time of rest. Sometimes, in order to get rest, you’ve got to make the system work for you. Thankfully, there’s no need to cheat your teaching obligations to achieve this. Rather, you may want to be a bit craftier in forming your teaching plans, exams, and even projects. You can take advantage of the cloud to make paperless examinations, or even rely on tools on your phone and laptop like calendars to streamline your schedule. This gives you more chances of being away from the screen once you finish your obligations – instead of having to worry about making your next teaching plan.
  • Aside from actually relying on apps and tools for relaxation, it helps to streamline your teaching duties via apps and platforms in order to maximize your time for R&R. This is important, as not only does this ensure you don’t worry as much about workflow, but also that you can get back to work as soon as you’re done resting. Remember, rest is important, but it’s much better if it really helps you become a better teacher as well. Organization apps like Wunderlist and Calendly are great for storing notes and calendars, while Time Timer can be a great tool for timing your resting periods.
  • Take advantage of internal smartphone applications such as the built-in Alarm or Clock, Calendar, and even Notes that can help you store tasks. They might seem “clunky” and tricky to use, but given enough practice, you can actually tackle some requirements on-the-go (on the way to school or back home), making more effective use of your time and giving you enough leeway to rest.
  • We prioritize maximizing opportunities to rest at home as getting enough sleep can have a lot of advantages for everyone, especially teachers. Getting the right sleep can give more oxygen to the brain, improving cognitive function. Enough sleep also gives the brain more processing power to assess emotions, enabling teachers to be more aware of what’s happening to students and what they need.

• MMOs empower students and teachers to explore worlds, narratives together. If you want to do something radical with your teaching strategy, you can actually incorporate your rest days and teaching strategies together. Provided you have a flexible-enough curriculum, you can actually help students get motivated to learn through playing multiplayer games such as Madalin Stunt Cars 3 – provided there’s a point, of course. The many dimensions that go into the creation of an MMO can become a jumping-off point for many academic lessons. This means you can enjoy playing a game while still teaching.
  • A lot of people fail to consider how MMOs tend to be walking case studies. One can almost certainly relate an aspect of academic studies to an MMO – including auction houses and microtransactions (Business and Marketing), reportage (Media), or even creative design (Arts). If you consider yourself an MMO lover, you can have part of your academic requirements center around an MMO – meaning you can relax and play while still teaching.
  • MMOs can be a great bonding experience between teachers and students. Provided the school allows it, you can actually have your students play online games together in teams and make presentations and papers about their experience. Despite the nature of MMOs to be games “for fun,” there’s actually a lot of depth you can explore and values you can teach students. This can also be a great jumping-off point to teach them relevant lessons related to the course.

Tech for Rest: Teachers Need Breaks, Too

It’s quite a shame to witness technology grow, develop, and evolve to a point where it can accommodate holistic learning methods in various classroom settings, and yet there’s not enough tech out there to ensure both the physical and emotional health of teachers that best utilize these educational materials. Thankfully, we’ve been able to gleam insights on useful tech teachers can use to get much-needed rest after a stressful day of teaching and paperwork. And perhaps the best part is that all of these tech suggestions have their own sets of features geared towards the kind of comfort teachers ought to experience every once in a while.

Do you see yourself trying any of these technological ideas soon? What do you think can be other tools to improve our teachers’ health and teaching performance? Be sure to let us know below!

John Salazar

John Salazar is a certified techie-at-heart, but he shares a love for all things science and technology, health and wellness, and even a bit of music on the side. As a creative writer, John makes sure to write both informative and entertaining pieces. He loves writing, and he plays the guitar when he has free time.