TextExpander: How to Save Time Writing Emails and Providing Online Assignment Feedback

Have you ever been grading online assignments or replying to emails when it just felt like you were saying different versions of the same thing over and over again? I feel that way a lot of the time, and I know I’m not the only one. It turns out there’s actually a solution for this problem, and it’s called TextExpander.

Ok, so I don’t have a subscription with TextExpander yet. However, I’ve been hearing amazing things about this product from colleagues in the last few months, it sounds pretty exciting for someone in my position, and I can almost guarantee it’ll be the next hack I use as a busy online instructor. 

This is not an ad, but I’ve wanted to write a blog post about TextExpander since the day I heard about it a number of months ago, and I figured I may as well use this as a reason to learn more about the program.

For those of you that have never heard of TextExpander, it basically helps you create shortcuts for any commonly used phrases you might use while typing on your Mac or PC (or even your smartphone- which I think is actually the part that excites me the most). For someone who teaches online college classes like me, TextExpander could be used for the common emails or feedback you give to students so that you don’t have to spend as much time (and patience) writing very familiar chunks of feedback to every student for every assignment. Instead, you type in a short code of your choice (it can even be as short as one letter), and TextExpander fills in the rest of the intended message.

Most of you who teach predominantly online probably have a growing list of common assignment feedback in one or more Word documents (like myself), and if you’re anything like me, looking at that long document (that’s become slightly less organized over the years..) can be a bit overwhelming. TextExpander just seems to be the natural solution to this problem.

It was a little hard for me to wrap my head around at first (this is the type of product that had only existed in my dreams), so for those of you who’d still like more information, the following video and article helped to clarify things for me.

TextExpander Simply Saves Time! – Quick Tutorial

Text Expander is Awesome and Here’s Why

Happy teaching and happy learning!