Teaching and papers go hand in hand. It seems like as a teacher you have to deal with papers, and a lot of them. I wanted to talk to you today about how I organize my teacher files and reduce the amount of paper clutter I have in my life. More importantly, I want to let you know about the reasons behind my switch over to the digital world.
I have been teaching for only 3 years, so after about 6 months of fighting with TPT, binders, and other products I decided to go almost 100% digital. Like ... just jump in. While I desperately love the look of those organized binders, with their cute covers, and their dividers, I find I can never keep up with it. I go through an organization blitz where I spend hours upon hours getting everything just perfect, trying to come up with a new system, but without fail, all my new files get pushed to the back burner.
Another frustration I had with the paper system is that I HAD to be at a location to use it. For my first 2 years of teaching, we commuted to the city on the weekends and lived in the small town during the week. Our reasons behind this could be a totally different blog post, but regardless, it meant that on the weekends I either had to take half my classroom home with me, or I wasn't able to use that resource until we were back in town. Such a pain! Using digital, and especially the magic of Dropbox, I was able to get my files at home, at school, at the grocery store, wherever I needed! It was magic!
With so many of my resources being online downloads, it seemed such a waste to also print them off. The amount of paper it used was astronomical. With digital, I can retain the entire file but only print off the pages that are necessary. Also, I love how a page looks when it is printed straight from the computer instead of photocopied with all of it's imperfections, hole punches and snags. It is just so bright, crisp and new :)
When I moved at the end of my second year of teaching, I found another HUUUUUGE benefit to having digital files. I did not have to pack up my papers! They were done! I have all my teacher resource books, and maybe 2 inches worth of printed resources, but the amount of time, effort and energy I saved because I didn't have to cart around those paper files. Oh. My. Goodness. I can't even imagine. So much easier to pack up a classroom!
Now, granted, I came into teaching at the perfect time to go digital. It was easy to scan those 6 months worth of files to label and put them in order. I can't even imagine the headache if I had been teaching for 10+ years, but for me, it has been truly fabulous.
While there are positives to having those binders and papers at your fingertips, I have fallen in love with the convenience of the digital world. There are the occasional things I do end up printing and putting into those fancy binders, with the fancy covers and organizing with sticky notes, but there have been so many positives to using the digital world I doubt I will ever go back, and I hope I have given you some reasons to look into a more digtally organized life.
Stay tuned for my next blog post where I go into the specifics on how I organize my files to reduce headache and to make sure I don't have things get lost in the black holes of my computer.
Lora Camp
Campinwiththeclass
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