Sunday, April 8, 2018

Organize your teaching: computer tips for teachers looking to keep track of their 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. What do I mean by resources? 

  1. Work from students, work from different classes, work of different types (e.g. tests, worksheets, quizzes, both print and electronic).
  2. Work from admin (e-mails, e-mails, e-mails, some of which you may even print out).
  3. Communication with parents (e-mails, e-mails, e-mails).
  4. A bookshelf full of workbooks and textbooks and resources.
  5. Everything you create: all of your ...

    • Presentations on your hard drive
    • Presentations saved to a cloud service
    • Tests, worksheets, quizzes: some shared with coworkers on a cloud, some local to your computer
    • Saved online resources (bookmarks, videos, word lists, etc.)
    • Posts to students via an online classroom service (e.g. Edmodo, Moodle, Google Classroom) 

See what I mean by problem? It's a lot. 



In the first year or two of teaching at a new school, you're probably happy just to have enough organization to get through a day, a week, a term. After things settle down you have the first rewarding instances of being able to reuse or adjust your own materials made for prior classes. Then you find you have to go hunting through your own materials: "Wait, where's that slide show I made to explain the Dative case?" Once your materials grow and grow and grow it becomes more than urgent to organize them well, or else:

  • you'll repeat yourself, and spend time you don't have in doing so.
  • or, you'll run out of time, and in a pinch you'll use materials you found elsewhere that don't really suit your students' needs, because you didn't have time to alter them. Learning suffers as a result.
  • your students will notice you're scattered, and the value of anything you give them diminishes -- you've watered down the impact of the resources you use. 
I would ask you to consider this last point from the students' point of view: whose worksheets would you lose first, your worksheets from Teacher A that have a different font and layout and even watermark (!) every time you receive them and which aren't numbered, or your worksheets from Teacher B, which are numbered and have a similar font and format every time and form a cohesive whole over the year? 

Believe me, students notice these things.

The solution: anything but one-size-fits-all. I would say that "you will know what works best for you," but that's the point -- what if you don't? What if you're overwhelmed, as many teachers have good reason to be? The purpose of this post is to show you what I do, to make specific as well as general suggestions, and to help you in finding your own fit.

By the way: There are also some aspects of all of this that bedevil me still, and I am in my sixth year already of thinking about these things seriously, so the final purpose of this post is actually to seek help for myself. My biggest problem remains that my work is scattered across so many places:
  • a cloud platform (Google Drive in my case, which means I have both my own Drive and our Team Drive!)
  • a local server (Y:Drive on my school computer, though I will admit I use the desktop and only back it up quarterly!)
  • e-mails
  • printed materials (my own)
  • print materials (professionally published)
  • a virtual classroom (Google Classroom in my case)
  • archives from one year to the next.
Only a madman or a savant can sort all of this out without steady culling and vexation.

The general:
  1. Use Youtube to teach yourself things. For example, if some blogger tells you to manage all of your bookmarked webpages by adding folders, and you don't know how to make folders for your bookmarks (lots of teachers don't), then go to Youtube and search "How to make folders for your bookmarks Google Chrome." The first hit is excellent. Watch it and teach yourself.
  2. Use browser extensions, apps, and add-ons to help you edit your documents and web-based resources better. More on the specifics of that below. 
  3. Delete browser extensions, apps and add-ons once you establish that they are not helping you and that whoever recommended them to you was wrong; too many little extensions will mess with your browser anyway.  
  4. Use an external monitor, at least as a trial (not everyone needs one, but I find it indispensable). It gives you twice the screen area or more, it helps you refer back and forth between the web-based resources you are consulting and the word-processor ones you are creating, and it allows you to enlarge fonts and views in ways that are much more comfortable on your eyes.
  5. Use a mouse. The trackpad is too slow if you are a teacher who spends more than an hour a day at a computer. Use a comfortable, simple mouse that you can easily plug and unplug when you take your computer from your office to your classroom and back.

The specifics:


Browser-based work:

Bookmarks: 8 tips for using bookmarks on your browser to organize the webpages you use for your teaching.

Coming soon:

Set up for teaching

-- use youtube to search for things
-- use bookmarks
-- use google documents and bookmarks within the texts
-- don't let students submit work all over the place
-- use the comment function on documents for intermediate and older students, but less often for younger students
-- problem: documents saved on drive, and in e-mail, and saved to computer.
-- use browser extensions and apps:


  • adblock for youtube and for the web if you show things to students
  • download youtube videos (a major problem if you use videos that may be taken down later)
  • session buddy

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