Getting Students and Teachers Organized - tips and resources. I just saw a Tweet asking for tips on helping students to get organized, so I decided to write some tips up.
I am a very organized person (type A personality and was an engineer for ten years) and I used to teach organizational skills to other employees at one of my jobs. There are a ton of different organizational methods out there, but it is actually pretty easy to be organized and stay that way using some free tools. I use a variety of tools to keep myself organized and share them with other teachers and with my students. I have some links below to other articles I've written that are similar in nature, so please read those too. The first thing that is important is to decide what tools you are more comfortable with: paper or electronic. The trick to being organized is to always use your system and not deviate from it. Electronic organizing tools can be helpful because they can remind you of due dates, meetings, etc. through text messages, emails, and on-screen alerts. 1. 2. 3. 4.
Taking organizing and planning lessons from Ben Franklin - great tips for educators too. Ben Franklin was a prolific inventor and scientist and believed in being organized and on task.
Many of his quotes and ideas are still in use today. If you look at Ben’s schedule, you’ll see that he has two questions he asks himself and then some things he does every day. He asks himself “What good shall I do this day?” And then “What good have I done today?”. These are great questions to ask oneself when planning your day and then reflecting on your day, especially as an educator. Getting Students and Teachers Organized - tips and resources Great tips, ideas, resources, links (including to paper and electronic planners) Evernote - get organized - free and on all platforms iGoogle as a educational/organizational tool - revisited Thoughtboxes - organize everything you do - great resource for education Wunderlist - free and easy to use task manager Toodledo - An easy to use, free, powerful, online to-do list.
Open Thread: Are You a Filer or a Piler? — Online Collaboration. “A filer is a person who organizes information using a rigid structure, and a piler is someone who maintains a mostly unstructured information organization.”
[From Surviving the Information Explosion: How People Find Their Electronic Information (pdf)] Google Docs & Spreadsheets now offer folders for those people who want to explicitly organize their online files rather than relying on search. Duncan Riley of TechCrunch calls for Gmail to include folders too. He’s a filer. Simplified, filers rely on folders to find things they want while pilers rely on search. As I’ve gotten better at using search and as search has itself gotten better, I find myself relying less and less on folders or on Gmail’s labels. iPad Apps To Keep You Organized: iPad/iPhone Apps AppList. OrganizationforShorecrest - home. Webwise Ways to Work Smarter — Almost Organized.
Photo blogs let you share your photos with just a few special people or with the whole world.
Find out how to make a photo blog work for you! By now you’re probably familiar with blogging, which is basically an online journal that can be public, private or shared with only a chosen few. So what, then, is a photo blog? A photo blog is basically an online journal, but is done mostly with photos. In other words, it’s an online photo album with captions, but remember, it’s the photos that do most of the ‘talking.’
Uses for Photo Blogs Replace Old Photo Albums With the popularity of digital photography, you don’t have to rely on old-fashioned photo albums as the only way to preserve and share your photos – and you can also eliminate the boxes of photographs that are waiting for the day you have time to put them in albums. Travel Diary. Organized Desk. Are you a Filer or a Piler? Get in touch with your organizing style. Some of us are born filers.
We neatly sort our papers into logical groups, slip them carefully into color coded folders and tuck them securely into cabinets. We can close our eyes and visualize just which drawer and which row and which position that particular client folder is in, or where last year’s credit card bills or the appliance warranties are. But let’s face it; most of us are default pilers. We stack and mound and heap in precarious ways with only a general idea that, “The banking stuff is about six inches from the top and under that coffee stained folder” because we’re busy, hurried and necessarily take a “drop now and repent later” approach to paperwork.
But the good news is that you can be a filer or a piler and still be equally organized. Filing doesn’t always mean organized You can be just as organized whether you pile or file. But don’t be fooled – there are plenty of filers out there who can’t find a thing. Find the right piling tools. 7 Steps To Getting An Hour A Day Back.