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Three Tips for End-of-Year Digital Management

It’s 90 degrees and I hear lawn mowers all around me. That’s a sure sign that the end of the school year is here for most of us. After you pack-up your classroom for the summer take a moment to pack-up your digital classroom. Here are my tips for end-of-year digital management.

Archive/ Unpublish Courses

I don’t want my students posting in my online classroom when school isn’t in session. That’s why I’ll archive all of my Google Classroom classes. Archiving a Google Classroom class only takes a minute. To do it just click the little “three vertical dots” menu that appears next to your classroom’s title in your Google Classroom dashboard and then click “archive.” Here’s a short video explanation of the process.

If you’re a Microsoft Teams user you can archive the teams that you no longer need. That short process can be seen in this demo.

Those who use Canvas for their courses have a few options for closing out the school year. You can simply unpublish your course, conclude your course, or you can delete your course. My recommendation is to conclude the course then unpublish it or delete it once you have reconciled all of your final grades for the year. The options to conclude, unpublish, and delete courses is found in the “course details” section of your Canvas course.

Download/ Export/ Back-up Materials

If you’re moving from one school district to another over the summer, I’d highly recommend downloading any teaching materials you’ve made that you want to take with you. And if you’re staying in the same school I’d still recommend downloading copies of your most important digital materials because you never know what could happen over the summer.

Google Workspaces users can use Google Take-out to download any and all of the materials stored in their accounts. You can also download individual files and folders from your Google Drive account. Here’s a short video overview of that process.

Office 365 users can download files and folders stored in OneDrive. To do that simply open OneDrive then select the files or folders you want to download and OneDrive will create zip files for you. Here’s a quick video demo of the process.

Vacation Responders and Canned Messages

Turn on a vacation responder before starting summer break. It’s nice to remind parents or students who might email you over the summer that you’ll only be checking your email sporadically for a while or not at all until a certain date. Gmail and Outlook make it easy to turn on vacation responders. Here’s how to do it in Gmail and here’s how to do it in Outlook.

And if you do check your email during vacation, message templates can be a big time-saver. I use this method in Gmail to create canned messages.

Virtual Summer Camp!

The first session of the Practical Ed Tech Virtual Summer Camp starts in two weeks! There is still time to register for the June session as well as the July and August sessions. Group discounts are available.