neatly and neurotically organized by Lori
Fiefdom--an area over which a person
exerts authority or influence
Ok. Suz often pokes fun at this, but there is one section of my life that I can claim
complete and total organization. I wish it were my house, but it’s not.
This may sound crazy, but I am a digital organization DIVA.
It’s true! My thought is that if it regularly takes you longer than about 2
minutes to retrieve a digital file, something is wrong, bad, wrong. My work PC
is so pristine that I cringe at the very thought of someone saving anything on my desktop. That’s
right…even you Suzanne. Because my PC is super organized, it also helps keep me
organized in my classroom. When I tell you that I don’t really use filing
cabinets, I’m not exaggerating. There’s really no need because literally just
about everything that I have is put away—nice and tidy—in one of my digital
folders.
Many of us have used the tried and true binder system. You
know…you start the year with a big 2-inch binder. Slowly, everything you create
for your class—lesson plans, handouts, supplementary materials—all goes into
the binder. Typically this gets organized by unit or by grading period. It
works. I do the same thing, but I add a digital component.
 |
| It may seem slightly neurotic, but I can find any item in a matter of seconds. |
During the years that I taught Pre-AP English I, I compiled
a digital folder for each six weeks. I’ve done the same thing for Pre-AP
English II and now I’m currently building the same system for 10th
grade English. I wish that I had started this system sooner, but I didn’t start
thinking about digital organization until about my 3rd year of
teaching.
This is so useful when I think about the other side of my
job as the content specialist. Since I have to generate lots and lots and lots
of content for tutorials, acceleration programs, staff development, whatever—I
create a folder for everything I do.
It’s also incredibly important to think about the way that I
save a particular item because I want individual files to stay organized within
the folder. [I can already hear Suz laughing!] For example, for summer
acceleration, I saved all of the Reading lessons in the same way, but I
numbered them using an underscore so that it’s easy to see and the magical
computer will keep them in numerical order like this:
This makes it so nice for retrieving at a moment’s
notice—just ask Suzanne (or anyone, for that matter) how quickly I can send her
something when she asks. And even though she makes fun of my obsessive digital
folder system, something tells me that her own network folder looks just a
little bit different this year!
If your hard drive is a hot mess, my advice is to not clean
up what’s already there. Instead, start attending to the way that you save
items. In my mind, each document should always, always, always go in a folder. Otherwise, you are left at the mercy of the
alphabet and playing that awful mind game of
What-did-I-name-that-document-and-where-on-earth-IS-IT?!?!
Stop the madness. Put it in a folder. And yes…in the midst
of working on this very post…I stopped, saved as ‘Folder Fiefdom’ and put it in
my ‘CC Blog Post’ folder.
Because I rule.
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