Another school year has come and gone. Now that I have time over summer break, I am going to work on organizing my work cloud drive to help bring a bit more order to the chaos that every school year inherently has. Every year I say that I am going to be better about keeping my work cloud drive neat and organized, but then the reality of creating files and assignments on the fly sets in and I just drop files in where I can so that I can move on to something else.

Planning:

I like to plan out projects like cleaning up my cloud drive (Google in my case) before I actually do any work since this gives me a road map of where to go next. I look through my drive and choose the major topics that I want to organize around for example:

• Programs w/ Individual classes below.
• Administrative
• Daily Planning Presentations
• Projects (I use this to group files for various school projects that I work on)

This allows me to use the major folder structure that I already have in place as a guide to organize the files that have built up over the year. Grouping files by topic often helps me to keep many of the files intact from when I originally saved them and reduces the amount of moving of files. This method helps me to organize files more efficiently when I am creating the files and reducing my later work load. When I am organizing my files, I have the goal of making my first level of folders be only folders so that files are categories right away into some type of group. Additionally, this will significantly speed up file performance when I am searching for, opening/closing files and linking resources together. As I go through my files, I am also looking for documents that can be moved into my note-taking app OneNote. I move documents into OneNote that are mostly text based with simple tables and graphics and those that I wont need to make changes to in the future. Since OneNote has a very powerful Optical Character Recognition (OCR) search tool, I can very easily search the text, tabular and graphical text of these documents with standard search functionality that is built-in. Most of the major note-taking applications such as Evernote, Notation, GoodNotes or Google Keep.

Organizing the Files:

Now we are getting into the real work of cleaning up our cloud drives. If you have a lot of files that are floating around it can often be best to just pull all of those files into a single folder and begin to sort them out one by one. This is my preferred method for clearing out the clutter that often builds up in my main drive folder. Typically I like to work in chunks of files that are easy to manage say twenty to thirty at a time. I will drop these files onto my desktop and slowly work through a group at time in the morning while having some coffee each morning. I find it especially useful to open up my subfolders in tree view so that I can see the different levels of folders. This allows me to place files into the subfolders very specifically and a folder structure that is easy for me to remember and find files in without having to do lots of searching.

Naming Files:

I find one of the biggest challenges is in naming files, as many of the units and projects have similar files that can get lost in each other if I don’t name them correctly. One method I have found to combat this is to use file naming schemes, <Unit Number & Name> – <Activity Number & Name> – <Task Name>. This method allows me to build a folder structure that can easily be tracked or recreated if necessary, but also I can order files based on usage in single folder. This is especially useful when transferring files in bulk up to an LMS to be posted online for my students. This is just one example, I think that developing your own method for naming files is very important to organizing your digital files.

These methods can also be used to organize meeting and project notes and is a teachable skill that can be introduced into your classroom for students to learn to organize their digital materials.