Back-to-School Teacher Technology Checklist

You’ll surely end up working with hundreds, if not thousands, of digital files during the school year. Some of these will be administrative in nature, others will be communication memos, some will be for lesson planning, while still others will be for direct use with your students. Rather than recreating the wheel every year, develop an ongoing system for storing and organizing these files. This will make it much easier to locate and access these files again next year.

Most likely, you’ll be organizing your documents in an online file storage system, like Google Drive or Microsoft Teams. No matter the platform your school uses, there are a few tips that can help you be more organized.

One tip is to create folders, and to be intentional about how you set them up. You’ll want folders for your major job tasks, and it’s best if you don’t have too many of these at the main level. Perhaps you have primary ones for things like lessons and administrative documents, or maybe you create a main folder for each course or subject area that you teach. Identify what your big buckets of information will be. Then, within each of those folders, you can create subfolders as needed.

Other small steps can also save you time in the long run. Consider coming up with a color-coding system to help you quickly locate files. It’s also a good idea to develop naming conventions for your files to make it easier to find them later. Perhaps each file begins with the subject area or course, followed by the unit and lesson name. These consistent naming patterns even help when you use the search functionality within your storage system. By typing in a key portion of the naming convention, you can quickly filter down your list of potential files.

This is one of the most important decisions that you will make to start the year. How will you communicate with your students and their parents? Regardless of the method that you choose for this, it’s important to keep it as simple as possible.

This means finding a primary communication stream and using that for as much of your communication as possible. For parents, you might send out a weekly digital newsletter while also posting it in your LMS in a consistent location. Posting it in your LMS can provide the added benefit of having a catalog of past communication that parents can reference as needed.

For students, you might choose to send out a message through your LMS each day. Students will quickly anticipate that this is coming, and they can develop a habit of looking for it. You may instead decide to put all important communication in a slideshow at the top of your LMS. Another option is to use a centrally located calendar to post important information.

There are many ways to communicate effectively. The key is that you pick a system that feels easy and intuitive to use and then stick with it. Consistent communication is a major key to success.

While they certainly could be, it’s likely that not all assignments will be distributed and collected digitally. Still, at almost all grade levels, at least some work will be disseminated and submitted electronically.

There are advantages to a digital workflow. Students who are absent can access work from home. Parents can check in on it. Students are less likely to lose it. And, among these other benefits, teachers have time-stamped student work in one convenient location.

If you use a digital assignment workflow, you’ll want to make sure that it’s as simple and clear as possible. Where will students access assignments? Where will they find the directions? How will they submit their assignments? How will they know when the assignments are due? These are all logistical questions that your students will need answered in order to effectively use your system.

The more consistent you are with how you post assignments, directions, and due dates, the more likely students will be to follow through with your expectations. Some teachers post assignments on a classroom calendar. Others embed a slideshow at the top of their LMS for each day of class. Those slideshows can include directions and convenient links to assignments. Other teachers might decide to post daily messages with assignments listed.

Regardless of how you choose to do it, the key is to be consistent so that students don’t need to think about the logistical parts of an assignment. They can focus their mental energy on the academic work itself.

Creating classroom guidelines and policies overlaps with the first four items on the checklist, and it’s a very important part of preparing for the new school year. Students need to know what is expected from you before they can meet those expectations. Some schools have classroom policy templates to help get you started. Other times, you’ll need to create yours from scratch. As you prepare this for your classroom, make sure that what you create is in alignment with any school and district policies. You’ll also want to clearly outline any systems that you have created for your classroom. For example, if you expect students to submit assignments digitally, make sure they know how to do it.

Policies should be clear and make sense to your students. It’s often a good idea to solicit student input regarding policies and classroom expectations. Even if your students don’t assist with the development of the guidelines or policies, they can still help to describe what each means in practice. It can be helpful to have them explain what the guidelines will look like and sound like in the flow of an actual school day.

Consider posting these policies in your online class space: probably an LMS or classroom website. You may also want to share these with parents, so they can help reinforce your expectations at home.

Typically, this will include your LMS, digital gradebook, and attendance system. Some of this, especially rostering, might be set up for you by your instructional technology team, but oftentimes, you’ll need to do at least part of the setup yourself. It’s best to have these systems up and running before the first day of class.

If you use a digital gradebook, think about how you want to record and track student progress and grades. As you do this work, be sure to find out if your school requires the use of a certain system or grading scale. Then, set up your system accordingly. This might involve weighting grades, setting up categories, and establishing grade passback from your LMS.

For attendance, you will probably not need to do as much. You may have the option of creating seating charts or customizing the attendance view, but typically, you’ll just need to know how to take and manage attendance in the system provided to you.

Most times, your LMS or class website will be your main online learning space, and this will require the most work. This can be a platform like Seesaw, Google Classroom, Schoology, or Canvas, and it’s the ideal place to create a central hub of all things digital. You can put your communication here, use it to post class resources, and facilitate a digital assignment workflow. By making this digital space a central hub of information, students will quickly see that it’s important and get in the habit of going there. It can greatly simplify the logistics of your classroom.

As you set this up, again, make it as simple and intuitive as possible. Sometimes, department- or grade-level teachers will team up to create similarly designed online spaces so that students recognize the structure as they move from classroom to classroom. If this is not the case for you, make sure that you thoroughly review your own unique organizational system with your students. It’s even helpful to have them practice finding things you’ve posted and access and submit sample assignments to ensure they know your system before needing to turn in something that is more high stakes. Taking time early on to rehearse and cement these practices will save you lots of time and frustration down the road.

When it comes to technology, less is sometimes more. Rather than flooding students with an overwhelming number of digital tools at the beginning of the year, consider introducing a few core tools that can do many things. Once students get comfortable with a tool, you can introduce more.

This approach has a couple of advantages. First and foremost, it allows students to prioritize their cognitive energy on learning your academic content rather than spending it on navigating new technology. Second, a limited list of tools can actually enhance creativity by encouraging students to dive deeper into the capabilities of each individual tool, maximizing what it can do, and forcing them to invent creative ways of meeting their academic goals within the limits of the tool they are using. This can be a powerful life skill for them to develop.

As you choose these versatile, core tools, consider what you’ll want students to do with them. In addition to achieving your content standards, are there opportunities for your students to develop the life skills known as the 4 Cs through technology use: creation, collaboration, communication, and critical thinking?

Examples of this type of feature-rich product include digital tools like Seesaw, the Google or Microsoft Creative Suites (especially Slides or PowerPoint), Canva, and Adobe Express. All of these choices offer students many powerful options in one central location, and they are generally simple to use.

Hopefully, your technology will all work flawlessly, but at times, we know that technology can fail. To increase your odds of success, try out the tech tool that you hope to use before class starts. Ideally, log in as a student to make sure that their access works as intended. Sometimes, your teacher experience is different from that of your students or their parents. A little time testing it out in advance can save you a lot of headaches when class starts.

Your school or district likely has specialists in place to support you with technology use. This includes both technical support as well as support with integration and instructional use in your classroom. Find out who these people are and how to leverage their expertise.

They might be people like a computer technician or assistant, a media specialist, a tech integration specialist, or an instructional coach. These people are experts and are there to help you, so be sure to know who they are and how to contact them.