Get Organized! Three Websites All Teachers Should Know About

Papers to grade, parents to call, lessons to plan. As a teacher, squeezing every last moment out of the day becomes a highly refined art. Here are three websites that will help in your quest. And to sweeten the deal, they're all free.

Trello

Paper planners quiver in their boots when this site comes into town. Designed for project management in the business world, its flexible task-management abilities handle the multi-faceted, fast-paced world of the teacher with effortless grace. What makes it so great? Let's start with its structure—a simple hierarchy where the titles at each level (Organization, Board, List, Card, Checklist) can be customized to your specific needs. So, every organization can have multiple boards, every board can have multiple lists, and so on.

Why don't we look at an example? Here's a visual, explained in more detail below:

 

The organization is titled "5th Grade." While there are multiple boards for 5th grade (separated by subject in this example), the board we're currently looking at is for language arts. On each board, you have the ability to create multiple lists which can be organized by topic, assignment, or whatever system works well for you. Here, they're organized by weekday. Each list can have unlimited cards added. For each card, you can assign due dates, create checklists, attach documents, and even assign responsibility to a specific person. Better yet, the cards can move between lists and boards. So say I plan a lesson for Tuesday, but it gets pushed back to Thursday...I simply slide the card over to my Thursday list.

So whether you teach multiple preps in junior high or different subjects as an elementary teacher, Trello can be molded to fit your needs. And, of course, you can even use it for home life, so that all your to-dos can live in one space. 

All of these features would already supersede any paper planner I ever owned—but then it gets better. Trello is collaborative, meaning that more than one person can be shared on any list you create. This could be used to collaborate with colleagues for planning, to help student groups collaborate, or even to share with students as a homework calendar. For iOS users, Trello's iPad and iPhone apps seamlessly match the functionality of the website. The versatility and intelligent, simple design of this tool make the organizational possibilities endless.

Google Drive

If you're not familiar with Google Drive yet, it's time to move your collaborative and organizational ability into high gear. 

Looking for one place to store and organize all your digital documents and files? Upload PowerPoints, Word docs, PDFs, movies, and other files to Google Drive to create one large repository of all the resources you use as a teacher. Organize into folders and subfolders to make them easy to find. Here's a snapshot of the Google Drive I used in my classroom:

 

 

Even more cool, if you forget which folder you've put a file in, or can't remember the title of a document, you simply type a word or phrase from the document into the Google Drive search box (shown at the top of the image above). It will pull up all files that contain the words you search for, saving you time and mental energy. The only downside here is that some files you upload, such as PDFs and PowerPoints, are view-only, which means they cannot be edited through the Google Drive interface. 

More than just a storage solution, you can also create resources right inside Google Drive itself. You can create documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and drawings that are saved on the cloud, making them accessible anywhere you have Wi-Fi. This means you can forget about saving documents to a flash drive or e-mailing yourself the document you started at work so you can finish it at home. In fact, you can forget saving altogether—anything you create on Google Drive auto-saves every few seconds and creates a revision history each time it saves. This means that you can review and revert back to old versions if desired. Never fear losing your work again.

While this article focuses on organizational uses, there are many learning applications for this versatile set of web tools. A lot has been written about using Google Drive in the classroom, check out Lesson Planet's how-to videos to learn the ins and outs of operating in this online platform. Books like Going Google Powerful Tools for 21st Century Learning (Covili, 2012) are offer great repositories of practical application ideas.

Livebinders

Think of a traditional three-ring binder gone digital. These virtual binders can be used to curate websites, PDFs, and other docs into sections. Each section can have multiple tabs. Let's take a look at a binder put together by a math teacher who is doing a unit on geometry:

 

Tabs at the top represent different sections of the binder. Within the "Points, Lines, Planes, Angles" tab, there are a variety of tabs that link to webpages pertaining to the stated topic.  

While this Livebinder is set up for students by the teacher to learn about geometry, another idea is to use a Livebinder as a one-stop information center for a research project.  Set one section up with the directions, rubrics, and due dates. Another section could have articles to be used for research. (I'm tempted to get into the unlimited possibilities for students to use this app for creating their own projects, but that's for a different article).

What's more, you can decide whether to make each Livebinder private, or make it public for all to see. There is a huge repository of public Livebinders already available on the site (such as the one pictured above), rich with resources for all sorts of projects. Simply type in the topic you'd like more information on, and browse through binders that other teachers have lovingly compiled. 

The list of applications that can serve to streamline your planning life as a teacher is long, but these three websites are a fantastic place to start. And did I mention that they are free?