You Oughta Know About Organizing Your Computer!

I am linking up with Mrs. McClain’s “You Oughta Know” blog hop this month to tell you about organizing your computer!

The majority of worksheets and activities that teachers use are on the computer, but it can be pretty hard to keep track of everything.  I will show you how I organize my reading materials on the computer and hopefully you can get some ideas to help you!

First I created a new folder called ‘reading’.  To create a new folder, I just ‘right-clicked’ on my desktop and selected ‘New Folder’.  You can drag it to a different area later if you do not want it on your desktop.

My district uses the Common Core State Standards, so within my new reading folder I created two more folders: Literature and Informational Text.
(To create a new folder, I just right clicked within the reading folder and selected ‘New Folder’)

These next steps are a little time consuming, but VERY worth it.  Within each folder (Literature and Informational Text) I created a folder for every standard.

This is my literature folder

Then, within each of the standard folders I created four folders: PowerPoints, Resources, Tests and Worksheets.  There is a shortcut for this part!  After you create these four folders in one standard folder,  you can select these four folders and copy them.  Then, you can just paste them in the other standard folders.  Yay!
*Note – may sure these folders are empty when you copy them, otherwise everything in the folders will copy over too.

Finally, the most time consuming (but most rewarding) part – I organized all of my documents into the correct folder.  To do this, I just dragged the document into the folder where I wanted it.  I did this over the span of a few weeks and it was well worth it.  Now that all of my original documents are organized it is easy to stay organized because I just save any new documents to the corresponding folder.

And there you have it!  Organizational Perfection (:

Let me show you this in action:
If I am teaching Comparing and Contrasting (RL.1.9) and I am looking for worksheets that correspond with the standard, I know EXACTLY where they are.  All I do is click on my reading folder, click on literature, click on RL.1.9 and then click on Worksheets.  There are all of my worksheets for that standard in one place!

No more hours of searching for a specific worksheet.  No more having to spend time making materials because you can’t find the ones you need.  Now you have all of your materials organized in one area.

I use this same organizational method for my math materials as well.  How do you organize your computer?  I would love to hear other suggestions.  Also, please email me if you need any help with this or have any questions!