As teachers, many of us are (dare we admit it) addicted to sticky notes. The uses are endless and rarely a day goes by without recording something on sticky notes.

After using the reflection document for one week with our 8th Language Arts students, we made a few tweaks to add features and reflections that were requested by the students. We were expecting  major battle getting them to reflect, but they actually enjoy this! Don't get me wrong, it took about 3 days of direct instruction and full-class modeling and collaboration, but the quality is starting to show and the results on their learning are already present.

We worked with the students daily to get their feedback on the ease of use and functionality for their learning. We did end up tweaking a few of the sticky notes to better guide students to reflect deeply about their learning. Currently we are using the following sticky notes:

In the words of Super Educator Joe Marquez, "What we create for our classrooms does not belong to us, it belongs to education!" In his spirit, here are copies of the Sticky Note Reflection Docs we are currently using.

If you are a right-brain type, or middle-of-the-road-brain type, you will fall in love with the resources from Ladybug's Teacher Files. The possibilities are endless.

Trust me on this one-- forgo your Netflix binge for one Saturday and spend it exploring this site instead.

Here are two of my absolute favorites to get you started:

Here comes another callout to all of the OCD-Types out there who have been struggling with organization in Google Drive. While Google Drive's storage capacity is amazing for teachers, it also quickly becomes inundated with multiple copies of the same file--in various folders, all in different stages of edit--from year to year.
 
With this hack from computer science engineer Amit Agarwal you can finally have ONE Google Drive file and store it in multiple folder. The Bonus-- you can organize drive to meet your left-brain needs, and all every instances of the file will be auto-updated since they are essentially the same file.

​The process to ADD A FILE to multiple folders is outlined in two steps below:

The process to REMOVE A FILE from multiple folders is also completed in two simple steps:

For more in-depth instructions, or to see more tech ideas, visit Amit Agarwal's post here.

There are a few facts in the teaching realm most teachers can agree with:

1. Organizing assignment resources and instructions year-to-year is vital to teacher sanity, spare time, and the survival of trees ("Hello, Xerox Machine...").
2. Google Suite (previously Google Apps for Education) has many features to help teachers with this organization dilemma.
3. Other teacher gurus like Alice Keeler have further hacked Google Suite to make it work best for teachers.
4. Google Classroom still just doesn't have every feature that would make teachers' lives perfect.

That being said, I stumbled across a video post by teacher Tim Cavey that will save more of your sanity. Tim has hacked a super simple way to save your assignment resources and instructions on Google Classroom when you strike gold and create the perfect assignment--the assignment post where the sun shines, and birds sing, every student turns in their homework on time, someone brings you a Starbucks drink in the morning, and a choir of angels sings a heavenly chorus when they see your Google Classroom post. (Too much...?)

Check out Mr. Cavey's genius-level hack in the video below.

Friends of OCD-Anonymous will enjoy this Google Chrome organizational tool. With all of the educational websites, blog posts, and curriculum supports teachers bookmark, your Bookmarks Bar or Other Bookmarks dropdown menu may be a cluster of goodies. It can quickly become a hassle to quickly find the on-the-fly resource for your lesson or to find them for later lesson planning.