Remote Learning in Quarantine Is Hard. Alexa Reminders and Routines Can Help

On our second day of COVID-induced homeschooling, I shared a photo of my kids happily pecking away on a pair of old laptops. (Mary Poppins? Lightweight.) By week’s end my family situation had already devolved into a scholastic Lord of the Flies: piles of ignored work, missed meetings, tears and recrimination, and curses upon the gods, the ’rona, and our Department of Education. There is clearly no winning homeschooling, but we’ve found a way to at least keep up by offloading the tedium of scheduling and nagging to Amazon’s emotionally void robot, Alexa.

Besides being a handy and hands-free way to stream music and the news, Alexa provides a few blissfully simple ways to create a daily routine—even highly varied schedules by the day—that keeps your kids’ eyes on the prize and the school day in some semblance of order. For us, every weekday at 8 a.m. our Amazon Echo Dot plays a song to help ease wakeup. At 8:45 a chime goes off followed by a spoken message: “Time to sign in to class and answer the attendance question.” At 9:25 another chime goes off with a message telling my son he has his daily class video chat. And so on. You really can create as detailed a schedule as you need, varying it by day as necessary and including time for recess, lunch, or brain breaks. Once you have the basics down, you can also keep things interesting by varying from a simple chime to include other sounds, songs, and spoken messages. And if your house has smart-home devices, you could use Alexa Routines to trigger those devices as part of your schedule—for instance, you might have a smart bulb change color or flash in case your kids are wearing headphones, or if they’re in another part of the house, and will miss an Alexa announcement.

How to set up repeating Reminders in Alexa

If you just want to set a daily (or repeating) schedule with a simple announcement, set a Reminder for each activity or time period.

1. Open the Alexa smartphone app you used to set up your Echo device (make sure it has been updated).
2. At the upper left, tap the hidden menu button and then select Reminders & Alarms.
3. Tap the Reminders tab and then the plus symbol to create a new Reminder.
4. Create a name for it, which is what Alexa will say aloud at a designated time; select how often you want it to go off, and then choose which device or devices you want to make the announcement.

That’s it—if you want to disable the Reminder or change the time, message, or other details, you can always go into the Reminders section and edit it.

How to set up more sophisticated Routines in Alexa

A more sophisticated approach is to create Routines, which allow you to add one or several actions to an item on your schedule, including triggering Alexa Skills as well as smart-home devices.

1. Open the Alexa smartphone app you used to set up your Echo device.
2. At the upper left tap on the hidden menu button and then select Routines.
3. Tap the + symbol at the upper right to create a new Routine.
4. Give it a name, touch When this happens then Schedule, and then choose At Time and set the time; select Repeat and customize it to the appropriate days. When done, tap Next.
5. Touch the + symbol by Add action and select Alexa says and put in whatever you want Alexa to say at a given time. Hit Next.
6. If you want more actions, repeat the process: You can opt to have Alexa trigger a smart bulb, or read the news, or play a sound like a school bell or buzzer—sky’s the limit.
7. Touch the arrow by Choose Device and select which Echo device (or devices) you want to play your Routine. Hit Save.

As with Reminders, you can edit, disable, or delete Routines as you like.

Remember that your kids’ fascination is vanishingly brief, so plan on tweaking sounds and messages to keep things lively. Try swapping the sounds and messages and songs once a week, or adding a trivia question, or triggering a favorite Alexa Skill game (for ideas, see our favorites). And never lose sight of the goal: Every minute Alexa has them occupied is time they’re not spending getting all up in your grill.