Teachers and students are now increasingly turning to their Clouds in order to manage their various documents in order to alleviate the increasingly student bags. “You can never lose a file” sounds like a dream come true for anyone who creates multiple files and photos each day, which is the majority of our student and teaching community.
Increasingly, we are coming to the realisation that not deleting any photos from the last 10 years means that our Clouds are now massive, and finding the right file can take ages!
Modelling effective organization from a Digital Classroom
Google Classrooms and Microsoft Teams are both cross compatible with iPads, Apple and Android mobile devices to enable teachers to model effective organisation techniques to their students.
The feature I love in Google Classrooms is the tagging system. With this, your students can easily search and pull up files, chats and links that you have tagged into a particular topic.
The channel creation in Microsoft Teams means you can neat sorts your class resources into topics. This tames the Sharepoint beast by automatically sorting your files by the channel names you gave them in the Teams Sharepoint page. Students find it much easier to access these files from either Teams or their OneDrive launch page. This is so effective because it clearly shows what is personal to them and what is shared. They also have a model of what works well for their own file organisation.
Collating your information
The ultimate in digital organisation is to be able to instantly and intuitively store multi modal sources of information in one easy to reach place. Google Keep, Microsoft OneNote and Evernote.
Each one has their perks and drawbacks, depending on the vision for your classroom. I personally prefer OneNote because you can digitally ink, instantly insert media from your phone, add Word documents seamlessly and provide effective marking and feedback to your whole class.
However, for personal organizational use, all three are strong platforms, and the skill of using a digital notebook to organise your life means losing that all important picture of a whiteboard or a voice message of your teacher’s feedback is a thing of the past for your students.
DigiLin Learning 