Tasks for Digital Clean Up to Officially End the School Year

Do the 3 D’s

If you have an IT department at your school, it will most likely take care of a lot of the clean up on chrome books or individual devices issued to students. But as a teacher, you probably relied on Google Drive, Google Classroom, or some kind of equivalent software to keep track of your own classroom documents – which means you’re also in charge of keeping them clean and organized.

It can be a tedious task and one that is easy to avoid. But even if you feel mentally exhausted, the end of the year is the ideal time to reflect, edit, clean, purge and organize digital files. You can make it feel less overwhelming by using a simple 3-step process:

1. Decide – ask yourself, “when was the last time I used this document and was it helpful?”
2. Delete – if you can’t remember or it wasn’t helpful, delete it right then and there!
3. Delegate – give it a new home in a folder that makes sense, where you can find it again easily. If you aren’t sure how to organize your folders, consider organizing them by broader topics, then sorting individual documents as subfiles. Check out these tips to organize your Google drive – you can also apply them to whatever software you’re using.

Depending on how you work best, it may be most beneficial to set aside half a day to accomplish this file clean-up task all in one sitting; or try using the Pomodoro Technique to time block chunks of time each day and make it feel more manageable.

Just keep the end goal in mind: think about how good it will feel in August to see a clean and organized online workspace for your classroom!

Reflect on the Year

You may be ready to just put the past year behind you, but taking time to reflect on what worked and what didn’t is critical! If you wait until you’re back in the classroom getting ready to begin the new school year you will most likely:

• Forget vital information that is fresh in your mind right now
• You won’t take the time to reflect at all

If you’re mentally exhausted from the year – and rightfully so! – here are some prompts from Dr. Catlin Tucker to help you get started:

• Which of the new tools that you explored this year would you like to not only use again but explore more thoroughly?
• Which of them didn’t work for you? Why didn’t they work? Should you abandon them or give them more of your time to see if there is something that you missed?
• Is there another technology tool or online resource that you didn’t get a chance to try that you might try next year?
• If you used a learning management system this year (e.g., Google Classroom, Canvas, Schoology), what role will it play when you return to your classroom next year?

Answering these questions may bring to light gaps in your personal lesson plans or school-wide ebook implementation problems, in which case, EdTech is always here to help! Taking time to organize your files and reflect on the year will help provide you with closure and peace of mind, giving you renewed energy once you return to the classroom in August!

EdTech Solutions leverages education technology to improve learning by making it easy and simple for schools and students to manage and access individualized digital content on any device. EdTech’s cutting-edge approach to schoolwide ebook implementation and our innovative online platform and tools give school administrators and teachers the controls they need while providing students and parents with access to all their content on one easy-to-use platform with a single login, in most cases.

When you work with us, we create a personalized bookstore for your school where students can access and purchase their ebooks and textbooks on Shelfit.com. We also help publishers make their content available digitally to students on our robust multi-publisher ebook reader platform. We strongly believe that knowledge and good education should be available to all, and we are committed to developing and providing the online learning tools and modern services that make it possible.