I have spent about eight hours this weekend just organizing school papers (in my empty classroom!). Not grading or planning, just filing and trying to find the ones I need. It's been a turbulent beginning, lots of school-wide changes and challenges, but a lot of it is my fault for not filing and making useful notes last year.
I have master copies in huge binders but struggle with overlapping sets of materials that I use for some years and not others. This year's students need a lot more foundational work than they did last year, for instance, so I can't just plug and play the same lessons.
Over the past three weeks I have been trying to manually synch many years worth of files with lessons and handouts on them, layered onto four flashdrives and two computers. Again, as a USB drive gets full, I begin working off of two, then three, and now I started my fifth drive today.
Not only are the school papers like this, my photos and digital scans are the same way. I am scanning ancestoral pictures and digitizing slides, as well as archiving my own collection. Now the prints and digital files are all in a jumble, boxed, on USB drives, and some are even on FLickr.
Anyone else do things like this?
