How One Teacher Used AI to Automate School Admin & Beat Burnout | Show Us Your Stack

Feb 22, 2026

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Are you drowning in school admin and disjointed EdTech systems? In this episode of Show Us Your Stack, we sit down with Matthew, a science teacher based in India, who decided to stop waiting for perfect EdTech and started building his own.

Facing teacher shortages, curriculum revisions, and endless data entry, Matthew turned to AI to regain his time. He walks us through exactly how he uses tools like Claude Code and Google Apps Script to bypass strict school firewalls, build custom standards-based grading apps, and automate departmental budgets—all without being a professional software engineer.

If you want to take control of your workload and learn how to safely build AI tools specifically for your school's ecosystem, this conversation is packed with actionable insights.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

The Firewall Workaround: Why building within Google Workspace (Apps Script + Sheets) is the best way to deploy custom apps in restricted school environments.
The AI Tech Stack: Why Matthew transitioned from ChatGPT to Claude Code for architecting his education tools.
From Idea to App: The exact workflow for turning a messy spreadsheet into a clean, functional web app for teachers and students.
Beating Burnout: How investing time in AI up-front can drastically reduce daily administrative fatigue.

Episode Timestamps:

- Introduction to Matthew and the reality of teacher workload.

- Sink or Swim: Using AI for IB Science moderation and data.

- Matthew's workflow: Storyboarding with Claude and coding with Google Apps Script.

- Navigating school firewalls and data privacy with custom apps.

- Building a unified, standards-based grading dashboard.

- The best advice for educators looking to start coding with AI.

Links & Resources:

Mentioned AI Tools: Claude Code, Google Gemini, Google Apps Script.
Watch the video version of this interview on YouTube: https://youtu.be/4W6ja6uoLik
Connect with Alex on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandergray84/
Discover more episodes and resources: https://www.deepeducationnetwork.com/podcast

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