Spring clean: Refresh your online life, screens, and screen time

0:02 Hello Edu Magicians, welcome to the Edu Magic podcast with your host, Doctor Sam Fesich. Doctor Sam is a professor of education, author of Edu Magic, and a Pumpkin Spice Latte fan. This podcast is designed for pre service teachers. Remember friends, teaching doesn't begin at graduation, but during that first class at 8:00 AM. Let's get this party started. This podcast is a proud member of the Teach Better Podcast Network, Better Today, Better Tomorrow, and a podcast to get you there. Explore more podcasts at www.teachbetterpodcastnetwork.com.

0:44 Now let's get on to the episode. Hello there, Edge magicians, and welcome back to another episode of the Edge Magic Podcast. My name is Doctor Sam Fasich, and today we're going to be talking about spring cleaning our digital content. Whether we're spring cleaning your browser, spring cleaning your desktop, or maybe your inbox. Let's go ahead and talk about why it's important to clean out and take time to really reset these things as you move into the second part of the semester. Well, first, we know when we start to clean out stuff just like we do on our desks or in our living spaces, it really starts to reduce space and reduce clutter. That can help us with efficiency and effectiveness. It can help making us find our content a little bit easier and it can also help us with our well-being. So this segment is designed in three different areas. We're going to look at spring cleaning our online content on screen and our screen time.

1:52 So let's go ahead and start about start talking about spring cleaning our online line. So if you're an educator and you have lots of classes maybe on your D2L or Google Classroom or Schoology classes you have not looked at in a while, let's say the past year or six months, you might want to consider going through and archiving those classes so you can get to them later. But you don't need them on your screen right now. Go through and look and see what the grades are in your classes. Fill in any empty grades or maybe something that you would have skipped. Look at how you're naming your content.

2:33 So for me, sometimes I'll name my content whatever the topic is instead of maybe the week or the module. So I might want to add that into my naming of presentations and things like that so I can find it easier because I don't know what I'm looking for. But I might not have named it what I thought I did back then. So naming it, for example, module one week, one day, one presentation, Getting to know you instead of just getting to know you. Now let's go ahead and look at our storage online, whether that's OneDrive or Google Drive, maybe think about creating folders. So for my future teachers, my students in the crowd, think about creating some folders in your OneDrive or Google Drive. They can be semester folders like Fall 25 classes and then you put all the folders with the content in there for your classes from last semester.

3:29 If you don't have a folder for this semester yet, it's OK, you can create 1. So create a Spring 26 folder, but all create a folder for each of your classer classes into that folder so you can organize a little bit better. You might want to include in each of your class folders assignments, papers, presentations, and then you can organize that as well. So grouping similar items together, remove any deleted items or duplicated items in your folders. And if you want to get fancy, you can totally rock out with some color coding. Next, let's go ahead. Open up that inbox.

4:11 If you're a person that likes Inbox zero, that is a goal I have, but I haven't reached it in a while. So go ahead and look for and create some filters, maybe filter out emails. You can have filters for advice from your advisor, certain professors, clubs and organizations or classes. You can also unsubscribe from those mailings that you get, perhaps if you're getting a lot of them, or unsubscribe or work on Google Alerts, you can change those up or delete them. And then you might also want to think about what are some emails that you're writing a lot of repetitively and maybe create a little template for that e-mail.

4:52 So for example, I have a little template of an e-mail for students who might miss class because they're sick. So instead of me like retyping something similar each time, I have a little template that I have in OneNote that I'll just go ahead and pull and put it in there. I'll address it with some personal things as well. But now, like the meat of the e-mail is already written for me, which is really nice. So what I recommend is going through your e-mail, deleting anything that's not needed, archiving content, filtering, unsubscribing, and maybe creating a template for content that you no longer or creating a template for content that you don't need to spend the time writing it each time, but you can reuse.

5:39 All right, let's go ahead and talk about decluttering our device screens. And let's start with our with our laptop, right with our desktop screens. Maybe you're one of those students that like to save everything to the desktop. Well, there's a better way. Consider looking at the tools and the icons that you use most often. Look to see what's all of your to help you have just random pictures or files, group them together or put them into your OneDrive folders. That way you'll have access to it everywhere, not just on your device. If you're like, oh, I don't know where to put this, create a little folder and I have a little folder on my desktop that says organize later, and I have a lot of stuff in there. When I have time, I'll be able to organize it another time, but it's not cluttering up my desktop. You're also going to want to look at your Downloads folder in your browser.

6:36 Delete anything that's duplicated or stuff that you don't need anymore. Clean up your bookmarks. Is this something you can maybe organize into folders, or do you have like a whole string of tabs up? Think about how you might want to organize your browser bookmarks. Maybe remove any unused extensions, or for tabs that use often, consider pinning those tabs. Organize your bookmarks by category. Maybe you can organize them by classes or class resources or content. When you're looking at the apps on your phone, go ahead and go into unused apps and see what you haven't used in a while and get rid of those. That'll also help you free up some space on your device. So that'll be really helpful.

7:23 Try to keep your apps updated. So look to see what apps need updated and go ahead and update those just so that they are running at their best efficiency. All right, our next one is a little bit of a habit and we're going to look at spring cleaning our screen time habits. So let's really go ahead and look at how are you using your device? Where is your time going when you open up your device? How many opens do you have? How long are you spending on different apps? Is this are the apps helping you towards your goals, whether they are personal or professional goals? Consider setting up some boundaries like maybe no screen meals or taking a break from the screen one hour before you go to bed, or setting time boundaries, or I don't know, maybe even uninstalling an app that you might find is you're using a lot during your time. So go ahead and open up your device and look to see how often you're using your phone, how long you're using your phone, what apps are taking most of your time and how can you set some healthy boundaries around those. It's really important that in this in this current day, that you are really balancing your screen time with actual spending time with people around you.

8:45 So make sure you make time with friends and family and get out and move around your neighborhood or move around your campus. Make connections with those. Don't just always have your earbuds in or your headphones on. Try to engage with others outside of your device. Build routines into your day where you maybe instead of checking your phone first thing, maybe it says you get ready for the day, have breakfast and then check your phone. So try to build in those healthy habits where you're really being mindful of the time that you're using on your screen. And if you're a freshman or a sophomore or a junior student, you know, thinking about your screen time use when you're in block or fields or student teaching, this is something that you might need to work on keeping your device in your bag or keeping your device somewhere else so it's not a distraction and you're not tempted to pull out your phone as soon as you're bored.

9:42 It's OK to get bored. It's OK to maybe pick up a book that you actually turn the pages instead of scrolling. So I challenge you to try to set some new boundaries around screen time to help you prepare for your field placements for your student teaching. So you have those healthy boundaries in place now so they're not so hard whenever your student teaching too. All right, so let's talk about some tools that can help you to with your spring cleaning. Think about digital organizers like your Google Calendar or your Outlook calendar. Think about tools to help you get organized like Google Keep or OneNote to help you keep all your tasks in mind. Right to do is also another one.

10:32 Consider a password managers. So if you're that person who had uses the same two or three passwords, we know that that's not a good rule to have as a digital citizen, right? You want to differentiate our passwords, You might want to try a tool called LastPass where it keeps all of your passwords different. You don't have to remember, you just remember 1 password, the password to your LastPass account. Consider using tools like Calm or Stay Focused to help you focus in and listen to instrumental music. So that could also help you when it comes to whenever you're actually spring cleaning to focus in and get it done. All right, so let's recap.

11:12 We're going to clean up our online desktop digital clutter. We're going to organize our on screen tools on our icons and our files. And we're going to refresh some of our digital habits as we move into the next part of the semester. Try these habits out now so you can feel, try them on, see how they feel, tweak them, get better and keep, keep improving. So I want you to pick one area to start this week. Go ahead and share out those resources that you're doing the the strategies that you're using. I'd love to see what you're doing over on social and tag me on Instagram at S festish. That's SFECICH and I'll see you in the next episode.

11:55 All right, let's start fresh and stay fresh. You got this. Bye for now. And there you have it, Edu Magicians. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and share it with your friends. For more Edu Magic, check out S fessage.com and follow Doctor Sam on Twitter and Instagram at S fessage. Until next time you have the Edu Magic within you.