Introduction
Hey, I heard that you are starting your day early today. Your coffee is getting cold as you dive straight into the preparations for the tasks ahead. Papers surrounding you remind you of: lessons in the morning student assessments during new and administrative tasks by end of the day. Managing documents has now become a part of your routine. You are wondering if there was a way to reduce this workload so you can do what you love the most. Teaching!
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Managing Documents as an Educator
Every teacher will tell you that teaching is an ongoing process. And students as well as the teachers have their work cut out for them. Whereas students are learning new things! At the same time teachers are learning new things about their students at every step. These observations are recorded in Progress Reports. When a new concept is introduced to a student, they are introduced to it in a structured way. This structure usually goes into the Lesson Plan. These documents need a shelf to live on. Meaning: keeping a record which is accessible and safely stored for as long as needed. Record keeping continues long after school year is over. Physical storage is expensive and making it retrieval friendly is important but hard.
Teaching and then Managing Documenting.
Once the lessons are over and the reports are done. They have to work with administration to plan for the coming days and report for the day gone by. The work seems endless, full of satisfaction and yet exhausting.
Most of the administrative tasks are repetitive. Lesson plans are iterative and reports are incremental. And depending on the strength of your class, you are doing similar tasks for every student on loop-mode. Every single working day. Let’s take a journey along on how this impacts the teaching process.
Manage documents by organizing them according to their use.
Organization makes handling documents easier. Only if you know what goes where, only then will the system make sense. Knowing how you are going to use the documents, is the key here. As this becomes the foundation of organizing the documents. Does this mean handling documents and organizing documents is different. Yes!
Handling
While handling means how you manage, do, or deal with tasks, objects, or information. It’s about the actions and steps you take to handle something, like finishing tasks, solving problems, or doing specific actions.
Organizing
Organizing is about arranging items, information, or tasks in a structured way. It’s about creating order and efficiency so things are easy to find, use, or manage when you need them. Organizing includes sorting, putting things into categories, setting priorities, and arranging based on logic.
Relationship Between Handling and Organizing:
Complementary Actions
Effective handling often benefits from good organization. When things are well-organized, handling tasks or information becomes smoother and more efficient.
Sequential Processing
Organizing usually precedes handling. Before you can effectively handle something (like a task or information), you often need to organize it first.
Different & Varied Skill Sets
While handling may involve problem-solving, decision-making, or action-oriented skills, organizing often requires planning, categorization, and structural thinking skills.
Managing Document through Physical Organization
Tools Used: For Documents; Files; Folders
Actions:
Managing Document through Digital Organization
Tools Used: For Scanned Copies and Digital Files
Actions:
Store Smartly, Retrieve Easily
Now comes the simplest yet hard part. Once you have created something, you need to store it. Every other step, in a physical sense comes after it. You need a dependable system to save it securely, and an operable system to access it as and when needed.
Storing Physical Document in order to manage them in a better way.
If you are exclusively working with papers famously called physical or hard copies of any document, you will can follow the Comprehensive Manual Document Organization System (CM-DOS).
Creating Digital Document Repositories for better document management.
Digital backups gives you two options. One through which you manage your documents offline on a hard-drive. And with internet in the loop you can manage your documents through cloud.
OFFLINE
ONLINE
So Storing Digitally Adds an Extra Step?
Yes! Yet there is a key difference between both of them. Efficiency.
How? You ask.
Physical Storage!
Digital Storage!
Key Difference between Physical and Digital!
Transforming document management, a key aspect of record keeping, into a seamless process.
In a Document Management System efficiency, access, security, and growth of the record-keeping department, is improved greatly for the educators. As it streamlines processes, cuts costs, and makes overall document management easier.
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