I absolutely LOVE July! All the alarms on my phone have been either deleted or turned off for several weeks now. Not hearing their blares, chirps and bells has been pleasant. Living life at a relaxed, easy-going pace is just what this teacher needed after the school year that would never end. We had 18 snow days in my school district thanks to the repeat visits by a nasty weather phenomenon known as the Polar Vortex. I literally went straight from the end of the regular school year and, after one skimpy weekend, was right back to it with summer school.
Getting Organized in July
Those days are a rapidly fading memory now. My welcome letters to a new group of 4th grade students were delivered two weeks ago and my mind is thinking of new ways to be organized and efficient in the classroom. Oh, that’s another thing I LOVE – organizing!! I’m on a first-name basis with the sales clerks at my local Staples store. If I don’t make a trip there at least once a week, they start to worry!
Preserving My Sanity
One thing I had to get organized in order to preserve my sanity were all the dozens of usernames and passwords I’ve accumulated. It seems just about every website now requires some sort of log-in information, even if what they offer is free of charge. Okay. Fine. It only took a few password re-sets to convince me that I needed to get this part of my life organized – and fast!
Password Cards to the Rescue
Obviously security is a concern when it comes to your log-in information, but I didn’t want them so secure that not even I could log in! So I created a simple set of password cards to help me keep track of my username and password for each website I use as a teacher. The number of these websites grows regularly – just added a new one the other week, in fact. My acquisition of these websites falls somewhere along a continuum of responsible professional development and compulsive addiction…just depends on the day! 🙂
Easy-Peasy!
I made my password cards in shades of gray simply to keep it easy and cheap. I prefer to use color ink on high-visibility resources and these password cards didn’t qualify. If anything, I should be the only one seeing them for security reasons. Using the manual feed tray on my Brother laser printer, I fed a few sheets of white card stock through and printed the password cards. I trimmed them along the dotted lines, punched a hole in the upper left corner and bound them together with a loose binder ring. Done!
I used the manual feed tray and printed my cards on white card stock.
This is what the cards looked like after printing. You may need to gently bend the edges back a little to remove the curl after printing.
Trim the cards along the dotted line. Then write your information on each card. Print a few blanks for any new websites you acquire during the school year.
Hole punch the upper left corner and store the cards together with a loose ring binder.
You can get these cards for free at my Teachers Pay Teachers store. Now you never need to scramble through your desk for scraps of paper hoping to find your password for a much-needed website.
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