... and straight on 'til morning".
(from Peter Pan by Barrie J.M.)
To find something you first have to know where it is, or at least where it might be.
My mind is drawn to the closing shot of the first Indiana Jones film where the Ark of the Covenant is put in storage, in a crate, on a rack, in a warehouse and as the camera pulls back you realise that it is a big warehouse, a very big warehouse, and it is full of near identical crates, ranged rows deep down hundreds of aisles. Let's hope we don't need it in a hurry.
In the Spring 2006 edition of "New Teacher", published by the General Teaching Council for Scotland, it states "If you start off with a regime that would impress a British army manoeuvre you will find life gets easier. Set yourself some rules and keep to them, however long it takes." That is to say "Start as you mean to go on".
Whether using traditional, physical or e-based resources it is important that some sort of filing system be employed; ideally this should be catalogued in some way. Whilst there are a number of options for indexation, this need not be particularly complex, rather it should be logical, flexible, and above all clear both to the creator and to anyone else who might need to use it.
The advantage of indexing is that the references can be inserted into Schemes of Work and Lesson plans; this is of particular benefit if several versions of a resource exist which are differentiated in accordance with the Level of the student group, and, of course, it aides retrieval.
For on-line resources it is not essential to keep a printed-list of the full URLs; a series of word-processed documents with resource titles or images each with embedded hyper-links, will be of use for computer based lessons. They save miss-typing long web addresses and can be made to look less intimidating for the less IT confident As mentioned in a previous entry; I have produced such a document for links to the Quia website and, whilst this is still at the prototype stage, a hard-copy is included as an appendix to this assignment.
Electronic filing has another advantage as it means that the tutor is not carrying reams of handouts to classes. Rather the students can be directed to a folder, file, or link, which contains the relevant items for the task. Documents can be printed as required either by the tutor or individual students.
Original documents or, better, templates, may be stored on one drive, not directly accessible to the students. The students would be provided with shortcuts or other links to only those required for that lesson. These shortcuts could be on the student accessible part of the network, perhaps in a folder for their specific class. For many documents, especially if the student has to fill them in on-line or save them, the original should be a template which they have to save to their own drive in order to use it; thus protecting the source document.
Such a resource library can be built up on a pen-drive before uploading onto the live computer system. This also allows for a copy to be available for use or maintenance when the main network is not available.
Whether the final storage area is centralised or local, a logical filing structure should be employed and a simple example again is included as part of the appendix. Such methods allow for easy updates to resources as there is only one "master" copy to change and all students have access to it.
An extension of this idea can be found in the concept of Virtual Learning Environments (VLE), sometimes called a Course Management System (CMS) or Learning Management System (LMS), now employed by various educational establishments. One such is "Moodle", which is the VLE currently used at the college where I work. This allows for course notes and supporting documents to be available both within and remotely from the college. Because it is "open source" and has various additional modules and plug-ins allowing functions such as blogs, chat, calendars, student uploads, the educational establishment can adapt it to their course needs. It has the added advantage of being free to obtain.
... the general feedback from students was that they like the medium of a VLE. ... instant feedback for online assessments was a significant confidence-builder. Students are accessing the materials ... at college and at home. There is evidence that students have been referring to online lectures and other ... material as part of their revision ...
City of Sunderland College (Ellis 2001) cited by Becta nd online
Some resources are durable, either physically or the content or underlying principle does not vary much with time, others are far more ephemeral due to advances in science, or technology as well as changes due to the needs of stakehholders. As a result, however they are stored, it important that teaching resources be reviewed regularly to ensure they are still current and fit for purpose.
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