Organize your teaching: 8 tips for using browser bookmarks to keep track of web-based resources

The problem: a teacher deals with a daunting multitude of documents and resources, especially if they're teaching students in the secondary school and upper school, and almost regardless of which subject they teach.

Overview, with tips and global solutions: here.

Solution for keeping track of websites: learn to use bookmarks well. Here are 8 tips and tricks.


Bookmarks:

1. Use bookmarks. Use folders for your bookmarks. Hit Ctrl → Shift → O on the Chrome browser so that it takes you straight to your bookmarks. Organize your bookmarks into folders. Here is how mine looks: 
2. Create a bookmarks folder for each class you teach. Notice my folders for 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11. That is because I teach a class in each of those grades, so I have all of my bookmarks for each class in one folder.
3. An especially slick trick: create a folder inside the bookmark folder with all of the websites you need to access every time you teach a class. For example, every time I teach my Grade 7 class I need:
1. The attendance website we use, called ManageBac. It is bookmarked in a subfolder to my Grade 7 folder.
2. The Google Document I use to do all of my lesson planning. This too is bookmarked in the subfolder to my Grade 7 folder.
3. The other websites I want open in my browser are there too, but here's the really slick trick: they're not even mostly websites. Google Chrome lets you bookmark a Google Slides presentation you made, and a Google Drive folder you created, and the Google Classroom page you keep. 
4. So bookmark all of them into your folder for each class, and put them all in a subfolder. Then, right-click the subfolder and choose "open all in new window" or "open all in new tab." Boom. You've got a window open with each of the three or four or more websites you regularly need when you teach a class. For example:                          
4. Roll over your bookmarks from one year to the next. For example, when the 2017/18 school year is over, archive all of your bookmarks for that year before you set up your bookmarks for the 2017/18 school year. When you teach material again, even though it's to a new group of students, you will remember that you found good websites with a particular class. Keep your access to that. 
1. Here's an example of what I mean: If I taught a Grade 6 class two years ago and did a lot of research online to find good grammar materials that were appropriate to the students' age and language level, I don't want to lose that information, but I also won't spend the time it would take to cull it all into new folders. So I just save them like this:
5. Shorten your bookmark names so that you just have little icons on your browser bar. If you have twenty bookmarks saved directly to the face of your browser, you'll only be able to see a maximum of 10 of them before you run out of space. Now, you shouldn't be saving all of your bookmarks directly to the bookmarks bar anyway -- you should be using folders. But you want the most important ones right up front. Here's what you shouldn't do:
    You ran out of space. See all of those Youtube videos? You should put some into folders, but if you want fast access to them, you should shorten the titles. To do so, right-click the bookmark, find "Edit," then re-type the shortest name you will remember. The Youtube icon itself might be enough, or you can just use an abbreviation. Here's an example: 
   
    The "DE" Google Drive folder stands for German, obviously, but is only two letters long. I enter my Drive for German at least ten times a day, so I know exactly where it is without seeing the word "German." The "CoC" stands for "Cause of Concern" -- I fill this spreadsheet out often enough that a short abbreviation is enough to remind me what it is, and I can find it right there at my browser. Before, I used to go digging in my files. Your coworkers likely still do this. Can you hear them asking "Now where is that spreadsheet saved?" They look in their e-mails, but their inbox has three thousand messages, so they give up. They look in their cloud drives, but their drives have hundreds of documents. They scroll and scroll and scroll. They would do a search, but they don't remember exactly what the document is called, so that's no help. They have a colleague who remembers where it is re-forward it to them in an e-mail. Now their inbox has three thousand and one messages. Cringe.
6. Cull your bookmarks in the summer, or when you have loads of time. Re-organize bookmarks by topic, delete dead or irrelevant bookmarks, and empty old folders. For example, go through your Grade 7 folder from 2016/2017 and delete all the links you no longer need; some of the links won't even work any more. (Special insider tip: there are even little apps that check your bookmarks for you and delete bookmarks that no longer lead to the original page or which receive a 404 message! One example is Broken Link Checker.) Take the links you still want, and add them to new folders that you organize by topic instead -- create a new folder for "Beginner German" and a subfolder for "reading texts by topic" and even another subfolder for "Home and school", one for "Family", one for "Hobbies", etc. This is slow work, but you will thank yourself the next time you teach a beginner class, no matter what grade level it is and what year it is!
7. Search your bookmarks. Can't remember what folder you put that bookmark into, the one that was a good video about transportation? Then use the upper-right-hand search box in your bookmark manager (remember CTRL plus SHIFT plus O), and look for it there.
8. Rename your bookmarks. The default name that Google assigns a bookmark is often useless or misleading. Give it your own name, and if you're really smart, you'll develop your own taxonomy with internally consistent logic over time.

Tl;dr: Digging for the same documents over and over again is simply silly. Find your files faster with bookmarks; the time it saves is significant.