2011 Work Organisation

Last Updated on Thursday, 10 February 2011 09:13 Written by Atticus Thursday, 10 February 2011 09:05

It was a struggle to come up with a solution to my organisational needs this year.  In the end I came up with a mixture of technology and paper.  It sounds odd on a stationery blog to be choosing a tech solution but in this case it has worked for me, at least to some degree.

Last year I used a spreadsheet to mark my class rolls and a large (21cm) Moleskine notebook diary to record important dates and reminders.  The Moleskine notebook diary presents the week at a glance on the left and a ruled page for notes on the right.

The alternative to this setup was an A4 sized teacher planner that is quite thick and heavy but also enables me to keep most of my information in the one place.  I travel a fair amount everyday so I found this option too heavy and there was also no way to 'backup' my class rolls.  Class rolls these days are legal documents.

So the choice was to continue with last year's partially successful solution or adapt and find a new one.

Above is the 2011 Moleskine Weekly Notebook Diary in my Gfeller leather case.

After flirting with the idea of a Delfonic or Quo Vadis diary I ended up getting the Moleskine Weekly notebook again.  I like it because I convert the ruled page into categorised To Do lists.  I also need to see the week at a glance rather than just a day.  My curriculum is planned by the week rather than by the lesson.  However this leaves no spare paper for lists, brainstorming and so on. So, to supplement the Moleskine diary I purchased a pocket sized reporter style Moleskine ruled notebook.  Together they are small and lightweight.  The Moleskine weekly diary is small and light enough to fit into a briefcase or napsack without creating dead weight and the reporter notebook is small enough to live in my pocket for incident reports during playground duty.

Above is my pocket sized Moleskine Reporter ruled notebook.

Everything in class needs to be recorded nowadays so I have expanded my spreadsheet functionality too.  This year the spreadsheets will not only handle the roll but also the recording of grades, draft submission, one-to-one consultations, behaviour and incident reports, toilet and drink breaks (yes, admin requires we log these), parent contact, and finally unit planning.  I have about 8 or 9 tabs in each spreadsheet and a spreadhseet for each class.

This is by no means a perfect solution but it is mobile and enables me to 'backup' the legal documents.

Once again I don't have a perfect system but I feel it is an improvement on last year.  Baby Steps, baby steps.

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