I Teach CS. These 23 Small Apps Quietly Kill the Busywork So I Can Actually Teach
Teaching Computer Science sounds like the dream job for someone who loves technology. But here’s what nobody tells you: you spend less time teaching than you think, and more time managing — managing files, managing emails, managing 30 students who all have different questions at the same time, managing a timetable that somehow has you in two rooms at once.
After 7 years in the classroom, I stopped waiting to get better at all of that. Instead, I started collecting tools that quietly absorb the friction so I don’t have to. Not AI hype. Not expensive software suites. Just small, focused Windows utilities — most of them free or one-time purchase — that each fix one specific annoyance that used to eat 20 minutes of my day.
This isn’t a listicle. It’s organized around the real problems that drain a teacher’s time: explaining things clearly in front of 30 students, building materials you can reuse, finding files you saved three months ago, not missing a class, and not drowning in paperwork. Under each problem, you’ll find the tool I actually use — and exactly how I use it.
Problem 1: Explaining things clearly, live
Live demos die in two ways: students can’t see your cursor, and they can’t tell which keys you just pressed. These three tools fix both.
CapyCursor
A Windows presentation tool that adds a spotlight around your cursor, lets you draw directly on screen, zoom into any area, and throw up an instant whiteboard — all triggered by hotkeys, on top of any running app.
There’s something I didn’t expect to love about a software tool: the pointer cursor that looks like a stick. It sounds trivial, but the moment I switched to it, something clicked. It feels like the old days of teaching — a teacher at a blackboard, stick in hand, pointing deliberately at each concept. That same deliberateness comes through on screen. Students track it naturally, without me having to say “no, that line, the one above it.”
Beyond the pointer, here’s what I actually use:
- Zoom — When I’m walking students through Word, Excel, or any Office app, the students in the back row genuinely cannot see where to click. I zoom in on the exact button or cell mid-lesson without switching apps or losing my flow. It’s become automatic.
- Whiteboard — I use this most when recording teaching videos. One hotkey blanks the screen and gives me a clean canvas to write and sketch on. No app switch, no losing the student’s attention. I can explain a concept visually, then jump straight back to the software I was demonstrating.
- Countdown timer — It’s there and I’ve used it, but honestly I reach for a dedicated timer tool for that (more on that later in the article). CapyCursor earns its place on the other three features alone.
I replaced Epic Pen with this — same idea (screen annotation), but CapyCursor’s spotlight, zoom, and built-in countdown timer cover more of what I actually need in one tool.
KeyViz
A free, open-source overlay that displays your keyboard shortcuts and mouse clicks on screen in real time, so your audience can always see exactly which keys you pressed.
When I’m teaching software — Word, Photoshop, anything shortcut-heavy — students need to see what my hands are doing, not just the result on screen. KeyViz puts my keystrokes on screen in real time, so nobody has to guess what I just pressed.
- The one use case that makes this irreplaceable for me: I teach students who use both Mac and Windows. Some are pressing Ctrl, others are pressing Cmd. Some see Alt, others see Option. KeyViz shows the actual keys as I press them, so both groups can follow along regardless of which machine they’re on. It sits quietly in the corner of the screen — top left or right — and does exactly one job, which is all I need from it.
Slide Show timer Pro
An always-on-top countdown timer that floats over any app — PowerPoint, a browser, anything — so students and speakers can see the clock without switching
Simple and effective. I use it for two things:
- First, to remind myself how much time I have left in the class. Teaching runs away from you if you’re not watching the clock, and glancing at a floating timer is faster than checking my phone or the wall.
- Second, for in-class quizzes and exams, I put the timer up on the projector so students can see exactly how much time they have left. What I like is the flexibility — it can run small and unobtrusive in the corner, or go full screen when I want the whole class focused on it.
Explaining clearly in the moment is half the job. The other half is making sure I never have to explain the same thing twice.
Problem 2: Building reusable teaching materials
Folge
A desktop tool that auto-captures a screenshot on every click as you work through any process, then lets you assemble those steps into a polished PDF, Word, or HTML guide in minutes.
I use Folge to build step-by-step guides for my students — things like how to add a header or footer in Word, how to insert citations, how to install an add-in in VS Code, or how to set up a new piece of software. The process is simple: I just do the thing while Folge captures every click automatically. Then I assemble it into a clean, professional-looking guide. What used to take me an hour of screenshotting and formatting now takes minutes.
FastStone Capture
A lightweight, one-time-purchase screenshot and screen recorder for Windows with a built-in editor — captures scrolling pages, annotates with arrows and text, and records short video clips without needing a separate app.
I bought this specifically for one feature: the annotation tool. When I need to mark up a screenshot to explain something — circle a button, draw an arrow, highlight a step — FastStone’s annotation tools are genuinely the best I’ve found. Nothing else comes close in terms of the quality and flexibility of the markup options.
I often use it alongside Folge. Folge captures the steps beautifully, but its built-in annotation isn’t as strong. So I’ll capture and annotate in FastStone, then bring those images into Folge to build the final guide. Together they cover everything.
Of course, building great materials only helps if you can actually find them again three months later.
Problem 3: Finding a file you saved three months ago
Listary
A Windows file search and app launcher that pops up the moment you double-tap Ctrl — type a few letters and it finds any file or opens any app instantly, far faster than Windows’ built-in search.
I cannot overstate how much time this saves me. Whenever I need a file, I double-tap Ctrl, type a few letters, and it’s open. I don’t need to remember where I saved it, which folder it’s in, or what I named it. It’s just there. It has quietly become one of those tools I’d notice immediately if it disappeared.
Gety
An AI-powered local file search engine that indexes the full content of every document on your drive and finds files by meaning, not just filename — so you can search for a concept and it surfaces the right file even if you can’t remember what it was called.
I’ve been using Gety for about a year now and it genuinely surprised me. Listary finds files by name — but sometimes I don’t know the name. I just remember something that was inside the file. Gety searches the actual content of your documents, so I can describe what I remember and it surfaces the right file.
Where it gets really interesting: I use it with my AI assistant. If I want to dig into a specific past paper problem, I can have the AI search through Gety’s index to find every paper that contains that question — and see how it appears across different years or formats. It turns my filing system into something I can actually have a conversation with.
Finding files is one kind of memory problem. Remembering where I’m supposed to be, and when, is another.
Problem 4: Losing track of time
I’ll be honest — keeping track of time has never been my strong suit. Dates, class times, deadlines — they blur together when you’re juggling multiple classes and a constant stream of new tasks every week. I knew I needed a system. The challenge was finding one I’d actually stick to.
A visual daily planner app that lays your tasks and calendar events out as a clear timeline, with an AI feature that auto-schedules work and automatically reshuffles the rest of your day when something changes.
I started with Apple Calendar. It worked, but manually adding every task every week quickly became more effort than I’d keep up with — so the calendar stayed empty and my head stayed cluttered.
So I went looking for something smarter. My requirements: AI that could add tasks automatically, a clean desktop widget, and ideally a one-time purchase.
I tried BusyCal first — powerful app, genuinely well-built, but no AI and no desktop app. Then I tried Simplified, which had almost everything I wanted, except its AI kept getting dates and times wrong when parsing tasks, and the widgets weren’t great. Two near-misses.
Then I found Structured, and I’ve been using it every day for over two years now.
What makes it stick for me is the AI. I can hand it a photo of a schedule, or just describe something in plain language, and it correctly pulls out the task, the date, and the time — without me having to fiddle with it. New week, new tasks, and I barely have to think about the setup. It also has a clean, visual timeline layout and a web app for Windows, so it’s not just a phone tool.
The one honest note: it’s felt a bit slower on my phone lately compared to when I first started using it. But even at less than its best, it’s still the tool I reach for first every morning to plan my day.
Me Calendar
A Windows app that keeps your Google, Outlook, or iCloud calendar pinned as a desktop widget, with one-click join buttons for Teams and Meet calls — so your schedule is always visible without opening any app.
Structured handles my planning beautifully — but it lives mostly on my phone. When I’m sitting at my Windows machine between classes, I don’t always want to pick up my phone just to check what’s next.
That’s where Me Calendar comes in. It sits on my desktop as a widget, always visible, always showing me my upcoming classes and tasks at a glance. No clicking, no opening apps. I just look at my screen and I know exactly what I have coming up and when.
It sounds simple, and it is — but that simplicity is the point. The combination of Structured for planning and Me Calendar for at-a-glance awareness on Windows means I genuinely don’t miss classes or deadlines anymore. One handles the thinking, the other handles the reminding.
Managing my own schedule is hard enough. Building one for an entire school is a different order of chaos.
Problem 5: Building the school timetable
Scheduling your own week is one thing. Building or fixing an entire school’s timetable — teachers, rooms, classes, constraints — is a different beast entirely.
FET (Free Timetabling Software)
A free, open-source scheduling engine for schools and universities: you input teachers, subjects, rooms, and constraints, and it automatically generates a working conflict-free timetable using a proper algorithmic solver.
Building the timetable from scratch: I got handed this task last year for one section and thought it’d be simple. Then I actually started — and hit the wall. Different rooms, different teachers, no double-booking either side, plus teacher preferences on top: some want mornings only, some refuse afternoons, some are unavailable at set times. Too many constraints stacking at once to solve by hand.
Rather than grind through it by hand, I went looking for a tool that could solve it for me. Found FET — and it was exactly what I’d been hoping existed. Fed in every constraint, let it solve, and three days later I had what should’ve taken weeks.
Lesson learned: collect all your data first — every teacher’s preferred/blocked times, every room, every subject. If you add constraints piecemeal, FET regenerates the entire timetable from scratch each time — and the result quickly becomes a mess. Get the full picture, then build once.
Honest note: the learning curve is brutal at first, nothing clicks early on — but once it does, it stays clicked. I’ve run this setup for almost a year now, across multiple sections.
Get Geek’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
One catch: FET’s output is functional but ugly, not something you’d hand to a HoD. Pair it with FET Viewer, a free tool that turns your FET file into something clean and printable.
With the timetable finally solved, the next time-sink was waiting where it always is: marking and paperwork.
Problem 6: Marking and paperwork
BulkPDF
A free, open-source tool that reads a spreadsheet row by row and auto-fills an existing PDF form with each row’s data, producing one completed, correctly-named PDF per record automatically.
Every term, student work gets scored task by task — question 1, question 2, question 3 — then totaled and averaged in Excel. That part’s manageable. The nightmare was what came after: taking those scores and manually transcribing them onto a paper form for each student, photographing it, converting to PDF, then sending the whole batch to school headquarters. With 3–4 classes, that’s 100+ students, each one written out by hand, one at a time.
BulkPDF killed that entire step. You set up one PDF template, point it at your Excel sheet, tell it which column maps to which field on the form — and it fills and generates all 100 PDFs in a few minutes, each one correctly named and correctly filled. What used to be an evening of manual writing and photographing is now essentially automatic once the Excel sheet is done. That’s it.
Paperwork handled, the last thing standing between me and a calm workday was my own desktop.
Problem 7: A desktop and filing system that fights you
Directory Opus
A powerful Windows File Explorer replacement with dual-pane views, multiple tabs, advanced filtering, batch renaming, and built-in file previews — designed for users who move, find, and manage large numbers of files daily.
Four things make this irreplaceable.
- Dual-pane view — two folders open side by side, so moving files between them is drag-and-drop instead of alt-tabbing between two Explorer windows.
- Built-in preview — hover or select a file and see its contents right there, no opening a separate app just to check what’s inside.
Batch rename — select a file, hit F2, and as you type the new name you can use arrow keys to move through the rest of the selected files, auto-filling each one in sequence. Handy when 30 submissions come back named inconsistently and you want them all in one pattern, fast. - Tags — mark a file “checked” or “incomplete” right after reviewing it, so you never have to reopen a student’s homework just to remember whether it was done properly.
The one that saves the most time, though, is scripts. Homework comes in through OneDrive — one folder per student. Sending a single file to 30 different student folders used to mean 30 repetitive copy-pastes. I built a script that copies the file into every selected folder at once. I’ve got another one for renaming: a student sends me their homework named something generic, and with the folder structure set up as student-name → files, a single keystroke renames it to something like ‘Lisa Week 1 Homework’ — instantly findable later instead of buried under a dozen “Homework_final_v2” files.
Fences
A Stardock utility that lets you group desktop icons into labeled, shaded zones (“fences”) and create Folder Portals — shortcuts that mirror the live contents of any folder directly onto your desktop.
Two features make Fences worth having.
- The first is double-click-to-hide. Mid-term, my desktop is a mess — PPTs, worksheets, exam drafts scattered everywhere. Before a class, that looks unprofessional on a projector. One double-click on the desktop and every icon vanishes. Double-click again and they’re all back. No dragging things into folders, no cleanup ritual. Just gone and back in one motion.
- The second — and the one I actually rely on day to day — is Folder Portals. Instead of opening Directory Opus and navigating somewhere every time I need a file, I’ve set up portals that mirror my most-used folders directly on the desktop. One shows all my PPTs, another shows admin documents, another shows homework files. Live contents, right there. Whatever I need is one glance away.
Text2Folders
A tiny portable utility that creates an entire folder structure from a pasted list of names instantly— paste 30 student names, hit create, get 30 folders instantly.
This one exists purely to kill a setup task I used to dread. Before each semester, I need a OneDrive folder for every student — and inside each one, subfolders for every week. With 100 students, that’s 100 folders to create before you’ve even gotten to the subfolders. The kind of job that eats an entire afternoon for no real thinking, just clicking.
Text2Folders kills it. Copy the student names straight from a spreadsheet, paste into the tool, and it creates all 100 folders in one go. Then I create the week folders once — Week 1 through Week 5 — and use Directory Opus’s copy-to-all-folders script to push that same set of subfolders into every student folder in one pass. A job that used to be a whole afternoon of clicking is done in a couple of minutes.
FreeFileSync
A free, open-source folder comparison and synchronization tool for Windows, macOS, and Linux that keeps two locations in sync and lets you choose between mirror mode (exact copy) and update mode (copy only new/changed files).
The problem it solves is specific: pushing teaching materials to the school NAS, or backing them up to a portable SSD, without manually tracking what’s already been copied and what changed since last time. Doing that by eye — scanning two folders, comparing dates, trying to remember what’s new — wastes time and it’s easy to miss something or copy the same file twice.
FreeFileSync compares both locations and copies over only what’s new or updated. A quick sync before I leave the office, and I know the NAS is a clean, current mirror of my working folder. No manual checking, no guessing.
File Converter
A free, open-source tool that adds a “File Converter” option to the Windows right-click context menu, letting you convert or compress video, audio, and image files to different formats without opening any separate application.
File Converter earns its spot on one thing: turning Word docs and PowerPoint slides into PDFs before sending them to students or printing. The usual way — open the file, go to File → Export, click through the PDF dialog — is slower than it needs to be and easy to fumble when you’re in a rush.
With File Converter, I right-click the file, pick “Convert to PDF,” and it’s done. No opening the file at all. Same for images — right-click, pick the format, convert. Whatever format a student or the school needs, it’s a right-click away instead of a full open-edit-export cycle.
A tidy filing system buys back a lot of time. Admin and email quietly take most of it right back — unless you fight for it.
Problem 8: Admin work eating your evenings
Canary Mail
A cross-platform email client that unifies Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, and IMAP inboxes in one place, with built-in AI that drafts emails in your voice, summarizes long threads, and silences spam automatically.
Writing professional emails used to mean opening ChatGPT separately, drafting there, then copy-pasting back into Outlook — which mangled formatting every time and added a whole extra step to something that should be quick. I got tired of it.
Canary Mail builds the AI in directly. I draft emails right inside the client — professional tone, in my voice — no switching apps, no formatting mess on the other end. It also summarizes long threads, so I’m not reading every reply in a 20-message admin chain just to catch up. Works on desktop and mobile, so the same inbox follows me wherever I’m checking email.
One honest note upfront: the lifetime license runs around $300, which is steep. But given how much friction it removes from daily email, I stopped thinking about the price pretty quickly.
PowerToys
A free Microsoft utility pack for Windows power users — highlights include Text Extractor (OCR from any image or screen area), PowerToys Run (fast app launcher), and a keyboard shortcut reference, among many others.
PowerToys has a lot packed in, but three features earn its place on my machine.
- Text Extractor — built-in OCR. Screenshot a printed worksheet, a textbook page, anything with text trapped in an image, and pull out editable text instantly. This is the one I reach for most.
- Awake — keeps the screen on indefinitely without touching the mouse. During a long lecture where I’m not clicking anything for stretches, the screen would normally time out and go dark mid-explanation. Awake just keeps it lit the whole session.
- PowerRename — bulk renames files right from the File Explorer context menu. Select a batch, right-click, set a find-and-replace rule — or a proper regex if you need pattern-based matching. It shows a live preview of every new name before anything changes, so I can catch mistakes before committing. I use it whenever I’ve got a pile of files that all need the same naming cleanup. Same idea as batch rename in Directory Opus, just built into Windows for free.
AutoClipX
A tiny Windows utility that automatically copies whatever text you select with the mouse straight to the clipboard — no Ctrl+C needed — and lets you paste with a single mouse button click.
AutoClipX solves one specific annoyance: the extra step before every copy. I was pulling quiz questions out of an AI tool and pasting them into another app constantly — select text, then remember to hit Ctrl+C, then switch over and paste. Small step, but repeated dozens of times a day it adds up.
With AutoClipX running, selecting the text is the copy. No separate keypress needed. Select, switch, paste. I’ve kept it on permanently since I found it — it’s one of those tools that saves a click every single time you move text between apps, which turns out to be more often than you’d think.
Writing Tools and AI Prompt Bridge
A system-tray AI writing assistant for Windows that lets you select text in any app, hit a hotkey, and instantly rewrite, summarize, fix grammar, or change tone — without ever copy-pasting into ChatGPT or switching windows.
These two cover several jobs I didn’t want to keep switching apps for.
Translation is the first. Parents often speak a different language than I do — select their message, hit the hotkey, get it translated on the spot. No copy-pasting into a separate tab mid-conversation.
The second is saved prompts. I’ve set one up specifically for converting a rough question into proper exam-style phrasing — I write the question in my own words, click one button, and it comes back formatted the way students see it on a real paper.
The one that saves the most time every term, though, is writing student comments. Each student needs a one-paragraph write-up covering their whole-term performance, and doing that from a blank page 100+ times is brutal. Instead, I jot down keywords for each student — attendance percentage, class behavior, participation level, topics to work on, any notes about phone use in class. I’ve built a prompt that takes those raw keywords and turns them into a proper, professionally written paragraph. What used to be writing full comments one by one from scratch is now typing a short list per student and letting the tool do the rest.
Beyond that, I use it day to day — softening a blunt draft before sending it over WeChat or email, or summarizing a long message so I don’t have to reread the whole thing.
AdGuard
A comprehensive ad blocker and content filter for Windows that strips ads, trackers, and pop-ups from all browsers and apps system-wide, keeping your screen clean during live web demos.
AdGuard is insurance against a specific worst-case: adware showing something inappropriate on screen mid-class. You never know when a laptop’s picked up something through a bad download or a sketchy site — and the risk isn’t just annoying pop-ups, it’s genuinely not knowing what’s going to flash on the projector in front of 30 students. That’s not a risk I’m willing to carry.
It strips ads and pop-ups system-wide, not just in one browser. Desktop notifications, YouTube ads, sidebar ads on random websites — all gone. Beyond the safety angle, it just makes browsing cleaner day to day. Pull up a YouTube video for class and it plays straight through, no ad breaking the flow in front of students.
A free official Microsoft utility that cleans junk files, trims startup apps, and checks system health in a single pass— a lightweight way to keep a Windows PC running smoothly without third-party bloat.
Microsoft PC Manager is the fix for a problem I created myself. I run a dedicated tool for almost every annoyance on my laptop — screenshots, renaming, email, file search, and on. That solves each problem individually, but it adds up: more background processes, more startup apps, more junk accumulating quietly over time. Eventually the laptop that’s supposed to save me time starts running slow instead.
The core use is simple: clear junk files, trim the startup apps I forgot were launching automatically, run a quick system health check. A few minutes before a teaching day and the laptop stays responsive instead of lagging mid-lesson.
Worth knowing it’s picked up an AI Tools tab too, beyond just cleanup. OCR text & table pulls text or table data straight out of a screenshot into editable form — overlaps with what I already use PowerToys for, but handy if PC Manager is already open. Circle to Act lets you circle any part of the screen and act on it directly — search, translate, quick actions — without a separate screenshot step first.
The honest takeaway
None of these are AI magic. Most are small, single-purpose Windows utilities — the kind that never show up in “Top EdTech Tools 2026” listicles because they’re not flashy. But that’s exactly the point. No single one of them changed my teaching. What changed it was the stack — dozens of tiny frictions removed every week, until the hour I used to lose to file-hunting, re-explaining, and retyping quietly came back to me. That reclaimed time doesn’t go into managing anymore. It goes into teaching.
So if you spend your days in front of a computer and a classroom, don’t go looking for the one perfect app. Audit your friction instead — the small, repeated annoyances you’ve stopped even noticing — and fix them one at a time.
What’s in your own toolkit? I’d genuinely like to know what I’m missing.
