Brent Warner
This is the HigherEdTech podcast Season Three, Episode Eight: Clearing the Clutter.

Tim Van Norman
Welcome to today’s HigherEdTech Podcast. I’m Tim Van Norman instructional technologist here at Irvine Valley College.

Brent Warner
And I’m Brent Warner professor of ESL here at IVC. We both enjoy integrating technology into the classroom, which is what this show is all about.

Tim Van Norman
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us today.

Brent Warner
So, Tim, you are in the future in Wisconsin in the past right now, as we’re recording you are in the future. And as people are listening, you are in the past, but you are in Wisconsin, how is it?

Tim Van Norman
I’m hoping that we don’t have too much snow and stuff. But yes, vacation time for me taking a little bit of time to relax.

Brent Warner
Much deserved.

Tim Van Norman
Much needed. That’s for sure.

Brent Warner
So yeah, so your are you? Are you driving out? Are you flying out?

Tim Van Norman
Driving. Both the whole trip, and my son and I are doing the first part together. And then my wife is already in Tennessee, which is our first stop. And we the three of us are coming home from through coming home from Tennessee through Wisconsin. Yes. For those of you who know the United States, that’s not necessarily the short way.

Brent Warner
No, that does not seem direct, but but you’ll enjoy the roads. And you’ll you’ll have a nice time. So that’ll be good.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Brent Warner
All right. So Tim, this is, by serendipity, today’s topic is something a little bit related to an issue that you have had in the very recent past. So I think we’re just gonna jump right over to it and get started. Alright, so clearing up the clutter, getting rid of the digital junk that might be all over the place. And we’re gonna we’re actually doing three segments this time, three sites, three different parts to this, and we’re gonna start off with cleaning up your desktop. Why is this important?

Tim Van Norman
Well, funny story. The weekend before we’re recording this, I was editing a video and ran out of space on my desktop computer is not good when you’re in the middle of editing. Because you never want to save over when you were just editing, right, just in case. And so yeah, I had to go in and do some of the stuff that we’re going to talk about literally in the middle of doing that. So when you mentioned it, Brent, I thought it was a great idea. Yeah.

Brent Warner
I think all of us kind of ended up getting a load of junk. Well, not all of us Sorry, there are some people were actually really good about clearing out their desktop, they are the more fastidious types. I my mic desktop looks like my bedroom, which is as if a glitter bomb has exploded. And there’s just stuff everywhere. tidiness is not one of my strong suits. So. So here we go. But cleaning up the desktop, I do try to do this every once in a while and I try to get like, you know, there’s so much like, like, so many icons on the, on my own desktop, or too many programs that, you know, sometimes I have programs that are super old, right, like, maybe I bought it. So for me on the Mac, I might have bought a program like eight years ago, and I go this is, you know, useful to me at that time. And I’m not using it really anymore, but I paid for it. And so I don’t really want to get rid of it. And maybe I’ll use it again. And even when and I don’t know if Windows is the same time you can tell me but even when the program no longer works with the modern operating system, I’m still kind of remiss in like getting rid of like it’s completely useless. It’s just dead storage space, but I have a hard time getting rid of some of these things. So So let’s talk a little bit about tips and techniques for maybe cleaning up your desktop.

Tim Van Norman
So the first one I absolutely understand and agree with you and this actually malwarebytes.com They’ve got a couple different packages. That’s ma l WAREBYT. S, you can download a lot of their stuff for free, run it on your computer and it goes through and it looks for malware. So that old program that you got maybe an update five years ago, create puts a malware something that’s not running properly in your computer. This will go through identify it and let you clean it and actually will clean it for you So you can run their free version, you can also pay for their software. And they’ve got it’s a really excellent program that I’ve used for probably five years or maybe even longer. Really nice, several different parts to it. But it’s a really good way of just cleaning up your computer from all the digital garbage that’s there doesn’t really get in, you can clean up old programs, but it more gets into the stuff that you’re not going to see. Yeah, I’m not going to realize. So like it when

Brent Warner
people get into their old like, some people that are less tech inclined might not realize that your programs create their own files and leave them behind and kind of tuck them away in hidden places. So even if you download something, and you’re like, oh, it’s only 50 megabytes, right, it’s not going to be that much space for me, it might have created like gigs of of stuff, right that you’re like either, of course the files themselves, but also it might have created a bunch of other files inside that they need access to, or plug in parts, or all sorts of things that might kind of bloat up your computer.

Tim Van Norman
Even more important are the things that are running when your computer’s running. So when you run a program, and close it, a lot of times is stay running or a component will stay running. And the disadvantage. The problem with that is that it’s more stuff for your computer to do. So you’ve got this really nice brand new computer, it’s got none of this stuff on it a year later, you’re wondering why it’s so old and so slow? Well, one of the things that a lot of operating systems recommend is just wipe the whole thing and start over. Well, why because you’ve wiped out all of the garbage, the dead programs that are still running Malwarebytes that’s what it does is it looks for those types of things. So that’s what I really love about that particular package.

Brent Warner
Great. So that might be one way and then I saw on here to one of the I think it’s one of their free programs. The ADW cleaner is part like you mentioned there many different programs. But I think that ADW cleaner is specifically goes and grabs I’m trying to remember because I where I believe, yeah, the adware and then cleans out all of that stuff as well. So that’s a great, you know, again, a lot of us don’t really recognize what’s going on, I want to be wary of how we’re presenting this, Tim because I don’t want people to go and just spend a bunch of money and buy the thing if they don’t necessarily need it, right. But at the same time, they might get some value out of the free version and then go Oh, hold on a second, maybe I should pay for like one run through of it or you know, get get a month version, or I don’t know, something like it’s, it’s every person’s computer is separate and different. And they have their own needs, but it’s worth taking a look into.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. Along with that. Um, as you mentioned, old programs, there’s old programs, if you’ve had your computer for six months, you probably have old programs on it. If you don’t believe me, take a look. If you’re on Windows, take a look and see how many versions of McAfee you have installed. Even if you use a different a different antivirus. McAfee will install itself two and three times for different things just by you browsing the internet, go in and clean those things out. If you’ve got multiple, multiple anti viruses, you really only need one. In fact, they will contradict each other and fight each other. So clean up old stuff. It’s really really helpful. Along with that, look for all the programs that you don’t use anymore. If and in a lot of the packages, a lot of the and by the way, we’re talking even on your cell phone. My cell phone has the thing that says not used in the last month. Well I go through it and I oh yeah, that’s true. I haven’t used that in forever delete or Oh, what’s that, you know, if you don’t know what it is by just looking at it, you you might not need it. So use the uninstall facilities don’t just go in and start trying to delete things on your own. Yeah,

Brent Warner
I’m gonna add some light to that Tim because I think a lot of people take a lot of pictures and screenshots on their phones. And so this is slightly adjacent but I did just read a good piece of advice, which is once a month, maybe the last day of the month or you know, the first day of the month or something, go into your photo album and just scan through the last month and delete any duplicates any blurry pictures and screenshots that you don’t even know why you have that screenshot anymore, right? And you can really cut down a big chunk and it doesn’t take you very long if you do it once a month. And I just tried it the other day I’m like Okay, let’s go back in the last month and I cleared out probably 50 or 60 photos that I’m just like I just you know I did I they were for the moment they were for a joke that I was sending to a friend, whatever it was right, and I don’t need that anymore. So. So if you can do that, you know, desktop, it’s a little bit different when you’re running pictures on your computer and kind of doing your photo album type of thing. But at least on your phone, you can clear those out pretty well. And I think with that, we can also transition back to desktop two, if you have a bunch of files on your desktop, one technique that I like to do, drop them all into a single folder, and then start going through that folder and figuring out where they’re going to go. So you start off with a clean looking desktop, right, all the mess that’s on top of there, this is by the way, how I clean my room, just put everything on the bed, right and then start sorting and figuring out where it’s gonna go. And so for me, that bed becomes, you know, a temporary folder, I might just call it temp, and drop everything in there, and then start looking through them. And just and then at the end, when I say, hey, everything that I need has been put away, the rest of everything that’s in there can just go right in the trash and that whole folder is done.

Tim Van Norman
And that concept is we’re going to come up a couple of times in this because that’s exactly what you need to do is get rid of some of those things, especially if you realize you got three copies of that video that you recorded. Maybe you want the original and you want the latest, but do you really need every version in between things like that, pay attention to that get rid of the stuff that you don’t need. And, you know, trash bin can be your your friend. And that’s just throw it in the trash, get rid of it and stuff like that. So yes, I see lots of desktops that have documents from four years ago that are still sitting on there. A year and a half ago, I was looking at documents from when my kids graduated from high school, you know, and all three of my kids have been out of high school now for a couple of years. So I don’t need those documents that were all that important 568 years ago. So clean it up, save it, put it out and put it someplace else. But realistically, it’s not of any use to you just sit on your desktop anyway. Along that line, backup all of your files to Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, whatever you got, each of those has a free version that will store a lot of information, back it up. The advantage to those online systems is that you can go back to a prior version. So if you accidentally delete it, you can get back to it. Stuff like that, just back it up. And now, especially with your photos, videos, anything like that, if it’s backed up, you can delete it off your computer, and all of a sudden, you got a lot of space. Mm hmm.

Brent Warner
Yeah, and there’s a lot a lot of parts in there too. Like, you know, I think we’re just gonna get repetitive and certain point. But like, when you have those things in your Dropbox, or in your Google Drive, or whatever it is, a lot of them can now be manipulated online, right? And so right, if you’re, you know, for me, I now work exclusively in Google Docs. But for example, someone you know, I like, people still send me Word documents, right. And it’s like, okay, I have to find a place for this. And the place then just becomes the online storage. And I can, I can manipulate it endlessly as I need to, and I don’t have to worry about it on my desktop.

Tim Van Norman
Well, and so to that point, I work almost exclusively in Google Drive, but I use Microsoft products to do it. So it’s, I’ve got it set up. It’s a separate drive on my computer, just like I work, I would work on a flash drive. Everything I do, the moment I hit save, it’s gone. It’s saved and I don’t have to think about it anymore. I have a natural archive. I have everything in place and it keeps my desktop and my storage clean.

Brent Warner
Good. Alright, so anything else for desktops?

Tim Van Norman
I think that’s a good, that’s a good amount of stuff. If people just did that they their lives would be a lot easier. Yeah, I know. Mine is when I do that. Right when

Brent Warner
we remember. Right? Alright, so let’s jump over. Okay, so there’s a bigger beast on in connection with the desktop, which is email, right? Email is just ever the bane of everybody’s existence. You know, it’s, it’s still the way that we work. I think there’s a lot of parts moving away from that. I think we’re seeing more less need for a lot of emails through things like teams and you know, all these other communication platforms, at least, hopefully, maybe reducing, I don’t know, or maybe just adding more more digital junk and other places. We’ll see. But, Tim, I think you have some ideas on ways that we can be a little one we can clean up our old emails and like get rid of the junk but also kind of organize ourselves a little bit better so that we’re not so cluttered.

Tim Van Norman
Well, and that’s exactly, we’re talking about cleaning clutter. And so maybe it’s not getting rid of everything, but putting it where you’re going to be able to find it. So for instance, this has been the first job I’ve ever had that I’ve been able to do it, but I have only about 30 emails in my inbox. Wow. Now I have probably gotten close to 75 or 100 today. So that means that I use it as my to do list. If I look at that, that means that anything I need to work on I have immediate access to I don’t have to search through 1000 emails to find I’ve got immediate access to it. Everything else gets filed. So for instance, when we’re we were discussing the podcasts, and hey, what do we want to do about the podcast? I have a podcast folder. I just put everything having to do with the podcast in that folder once I’m done with it. And I left just the last one, that was the link for you. And I had to talk. Okay, that one was sitting sitting in my inbox. Now when I’m done with this, I can move that into the podcast folder as well, because I don’t need that anymore. Right now. But if I do need it in the future, it’s available.

Brent Warner
So you’re kind of a so this is your, your approach to getting towards inbox zero, right. And a lot of people will talk about that idea. I mean, you’re not perfectly unboxing robot like, but it’s kind of that organizational method that some people do use. I know. Professor Jeff Johnson here on campus who listens to the show, Hey, Jeff, is I think he also gets inbox zero. And he’s very good about being clean and tidy with everything. And so every day, at the end of his day, I think last time I talked to him about it, he said, Oh, yeah, there’s just nothing in there. And I’m like, Oh, cool. I’ve got 7321 emails.

Tim Van Norman
Well, so part of what I see, because I see this all the time, part of what I see is, if you don’t clean it up, you’re going to have a whole lot of junk mail in there, that’s useless, or worse, that you’re going to click on thinking it’s important, and you’ve already forgotten about it, you know, a month ago. So if you can get in and clean it up. And frankly, what I’ve had to do in the past, when and I’m afraid after a vacation, I’m probably going to have to do this, create a folder. And this is my to do folder and move everything into that. So I have current, and I have the stuff that I get to get through. Because I, you know, it’s still there. But I need to be responsive to immediate emergencies. So sometimes you have to do that I have a general folder that any communication with faculty that is not related to a specific topic, project, or, or tool, I put in one folder, so that one’s got 10,000 emails in it. But it’s one place to go to look, hey, Brent had that problem before. And I’ve got one place to look not searching through 400,000 emails, or however many I happen to have, I don’t even know. So it’s really nice to do that organization. Another thing you can do, I know a lot of people who every year, or every six months, maybe even every semester, they go through and they archive everything that is from the prior year. Copy everything into one file, store it in their Google Drive, set it up in Outlook, or whatever your program is to be there. So you can still get back to it. But it’s out of your current inbox. And it’s a great way to clean up again, just get rid of it. And, and then honestly, I mean, some people will go back 1015 20 years in email. And that’s great. But they don’t have to,

Brent Warner
I think that makes sense to for teachers to do it kind of by semester. So if you said hey, you know, fall 21. And then at the end of your fall 21 kind of you can throw everything in there and, and a lot of teachers thinking those terms, right, like what semester was I in and so, so that would be a good way to get access to your old archive of emails as well.

Tim Van Norman
It’s really nice to do that. And it gets it out of your 25,000 emails that are in your inbox or something. There’s also neat ways of automatically filing emails. So I get every time somebody on campus has their computer lockup, I get an email. Every password that gets locked up, I get an email. So trust me, I don’t care about all those. But if you call as happened to me today, I went through to look because all of a sudden my account got locked. Well what computer did that I can actually tell in those emails. So it’s useful information, but it’s only useful historically. I don’t want it sitting in my inbox. So I immediately have it come in and go right into a folder that I can now search when I’m ready for it.

Brent Warner
So you know notification that it’s up there. anything like that, you’re just like, hey, it’s just gonna go straight into its own folder. And if you happen to need it at some point, you can get it from there.

Tim Van Norman
Exactly, exactly. So you can do that with a lot of things. It’s kind of like junk mail, where you identify something as junk and you put it away. It’s the same thing. But this isn’t junk cars, I don’t want to get rid of it. Right, I want it available for the future. So that all that said, also, junk mail, if you got something that’s junk mail, right click on it, set it as junk. And now all of those will go away. Do be careful, every once in a while, go through your junk and make sure you don’t have real email in there. But anything you can do to get stuff out of your inbox, without you having to deal with it. That’s that much less you got to deal with.

Brent Warner
So so for those first ones, if you’re talking about like automating, you know, hey, this mail is from Tim, I want mails from Tim to go into this folder, for example, you can go into Outlook, or Gmail or whatever your service is, and you can go set up filters for these. And so there’s lots and lots and lots of tutorials on these, and some of them are a little bit more complicated. I, I am currently using Outlook Tim, as I think, you know, I’m kind of had some struggles with some my other mail clients. But I still have issues with a lot of the way outlook works. It’s like, oh my god. But that’s what I’m currently using. So now I’m going to have to go in and learn how to create Smart Filters and all of those types of things. And it’s pretty easy with a YouTube search, right some some someone out there has videos on it and kind of teach you how to do it. And I think probably they even have, like tutorials built into it that help you get them done, but not too hard once you get a few of them going. And then you just have a set of rules. And it just says hey, if it if it has this, if it’s from this date, and one thing that I also, you know, I’m not sure how you feel about this, but I think is a good thing to do is, you know, if it’s for example, unread, and it’s been in your mailbox for 30 days, go to the trash, you know, hey, set these types of

Tim Van Norman
views. So, right. So there’s that there’s also remember, whenever you’re using Microsoft products, right click is your friend, right click will always give you a menu and often on those, the menu will be created rule junkmail, whatever it is, so use that. And chances are the first couple times you do it, you’ll realize it’s just so simple. So just use try the right click and see. But that alone can make your life a lot easier cleaning up that inbox. And frankly, when you go and you see that you got 4000 unread emails, is that a way of encouraging you to to do something that day? For me, when I go get in, and I see that I don’t have any emails, like when I left work, every email was was at least read. And I had I think six emails left today. And that’s because of the last meeting I was in. That’s done. I walk out of work, man, that is so nice to just be done. Yeah. So

Brent Warner
yeah, it’s kind of that that mental, you know, it’s like complete and you don’t have anything to worry about. Exactly. I’m gonna add one more thing on here on the end, which I heard from a podcast I used to listen to, they used to do this thing called Email forgiveness day, once a year where it’s like, hey, if there are things that I forgot or left behind or didn’t catch up on, you can you know, they, it’s as false but like, you know, you just give yourself permission to go back and respond and say, Hey, today’s email forgiveness day, I didn’t write to you about this two months ago. Here’s my response. And then also permission to just go in and say, Hey, all of this stuff that is from last semester that didn’t get dealt with, I’m just going to dump it it’s just gone like it can’t stay there forever and not be responded to and hey, guess what, you made it this far. You’re not fired. You know? It, you know, things happen, things slip away, but like you don’t want those constant reminders that they’re always there to kind of hound you. And so it’s okay to just go in and clear out the old stuff every once in a while too but you need to be able to give yourself permission for that.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. I’ve got the Zippy tip for today. All right, this is for Windows. Yes, I usually Brent you you might know him but in in the spirit of cleaning up clutter. There’s a software package that I have used for years. It’s called Space sniffer. Space sniff er all one word. And what it does is it gives you you run it it gives you a graphical view of all the folders on your computer. And inside a folder will be the sub folders and inside the sub folders will be all the way down to files. And the larger the folder is the graphically, the more stuff is stored in there. And in fact, it’ll even tell you what it is how much space is being taken up. So I’ve in the past, I’ve gone through it, and I’ve realized that hidden folders, I’m finding stuff in hidden folders that I just didn’t even know the folder existed. Or Oh, I thought that was just my documents. And it was storing some stuff on screencast ematic. Instead of score storing every video I have ever recorded the raw data for that video. Well, I don’t need all of that anymore, because I’ve got the completed thing. So get rid of that and it Live it will all automatically adjust for you as well. So really neat. Graphical space sniffer. Just look at it. Look it up on Google

Brent Warner
Space sniffer. Love it. Alright, so –

Tim Van Norman
Segment three. Here we are.

Brent Warner
As we’re talking about clutter, we’re cluttering our voices over each other. So cleaning up the last part here cleaning up Canvas. So Tim, we I started to kind of I presented this idea for the topic today. And you said, oh, yeah, we have to talk about Canvas. And it kind of connects because we talked a little bit about this last time on the last episode as well about kind of reorganizing your, your dashboard in Canvas and kind of cleaning up some of those things. So now we can kind of dig into a little bit more and really, hopefully clean up a lot of the bigger mess.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. So as an instructional technologist, often somebody will have me take a look at a assignment that’s not working in their class. One of the things that drives me nuts is when I click on Assignments, and I wait, and I wait, and I wait. And finally some assignments come up. And then more assignments come up. And I’m waiting and waiting. And you know, it feels like a minute later, probably is only 10 seconds, but it feels like forever. Finally, I get to the bottom assignment, because it’s always the last one that I need to look at. And added. So I look at that and deal with it. But what has happened is as I’m waiting, I’m realizing how many unpublished assignments are in there. How many assignments have a due date from 2019 2020, we’re finishing off 21, all kinds of stuff that’s in there. And when I asked about it, a lot of people will say, well, but I don’t want to lose those. Well, here’s one of the beautiful things about Canvas. If you delete them, they’re still in last semesters class. So you can clean up this semester, go back to last semester and pull something in if you truly need it. Okay. I’ve been fascinated by the number of people who have said, well, I’ve never, I’m never going to need it again. But I want to keep it well, again, if you do not. And here’s the key. If you do not go in and you don’t conclude your class, you have access to that class going forward. Right. So it’s a nice way to just clean up the clutter, get rid of the stuff that you’re not going to use anyway, announcements, you shouldn’t need to move all of your announcements to the end of the semester, and then hopefully close the class before you the announcements go out anything like that. Just clean it up. And it’s amazing how much faster Canvas is going to run when it doesn’t have all that stuff. Now, that said, understand that if you do delete the wrong thing, Canvas has an undelete Oh, so in your course, this might be news to a lot of people in your course, you go to the homepage and up at the top in the URL where it says courses slash and a number. Put us another slash that’s the forward slash the one under the question mark, and undelete behind it. And it will give you a list of basically everything you’ve deleted in your class. When the last time you did it. It’s an excellent hack. I use it all the time when somebody says I just deleted a quiz. Well, okay, I go in and I can fix it. Now. It doesn’t go. It does the major things, quizzes, assignments, pages, announcements, that type of thing. It’s not going to do a question from a quiz or something like that. But it is it’s the big stuff that you need. You can get back to it. So that said, there’s very little excuse to just leaving this in there. Yeah, I’m not. I’m not cleaning something up.

Brent Warner
Yeah. So if you work at IVC, or if you have an instructional technologist, Tim like you who is willing to do this, and I understand that for some reason, there’s some that are not but but you can ask your instructional technologist to also make you a you often make sandboxes but some people can also make an archive right and just say hey, can you make me an archive Shell, and I’m just going to send stuff to that archive shell. So it’s not that I’m going to be playing and experimenting with stuff. That’s just how I, you know, think of my sandbox but, but it’s like, Hey, this is old stuff. And maybe when you say that kind of silly thing, like, I’m never going to use this again, but I don’t want to get rid of it. Well, okay, put it in that archive shell, and you don’t ever have to think about where it is again in the future, right. And so you can always have this semester or this particular class clean, but you can still have all of your activities, discussions, pages, whatever you have made inside of Canvas there as well.

Tim Van Norman
And I completely understand the value of going back to old stuff, and looking at it for so I’m not in any way recommending you can just get rid of it. But out of your current view,

Brent Warner
it’s very useful for me, I go back quite a lot to my previous classes, and I’m like, How did I do it last time? And then, you know, is that gonna work for me this time around? Do I need to make adjustments, you know, maybe I’m always in a different, you know, unit or week, but I but the timing didn’t line up the same way in the calendar this time around. So there’s all sorts of reasons to, to keep older things, but not necessarily right in front of you where it slows you down.

Tim Van Norman
Right? Well, and talking about slowing you down. Here’s one of the issues that I often see, when you’re in the gradebook. In Canvas, there’s an option at the top under view that says unpublished assignments, if you have that checked, so you can view unpublished assignments, which is great if you’re the type of person who sets up assignments, but it’s not quite ready to publish it, and have students see it and, and stuff like that, if that’s the way you operate, which a lot of people do. You want to see that in your gradebook, you gotta you want to see what you’re working on. Well, if you’ve also got 200 Old assignments that you aren’t going to work on, it’s just a mess. So you can go in and uncheck that if you don’t want to clean it up. So just a way of getting a little bit nicer in the gradebook, because we all know how much time faculty spend in the gradebook way too much time. Exactly, exactly. All right.

Brent Warner
So those are a few things. Anything else going on for Canvas? I mean, there’s tons of places we can clean up files,

Tim Van Norman
ah, files. Okay. So I’m fascinated by the number of times I’m looking, I’m helping somebody out in a class and I see summer 2021. Syllabus, okay, summer 2021, syllabus, parentheses, one, summer 2021, syllabus, predecease, two summer 2020 ones parentheses, you know, over and over. And I’m like, oh, what’s up with this?

Brent Warner
Final version. Final version 1. Final version 1.1.

Tim Van Norman
Exactly, you, but what has happened is somebody went in, and in Canvas, they uploaded the syllabus into the syllabus, then not thinking about it, as Oh, it’s already here, I can just find it, they go into modules, and they upload it into a module, then they go into an assignment, and they’re gonna have an assignment about the syllabus. So they go in, and they upload it into this into the assignment. And then they make a change. So now they’ve got to go back through, and they re upload each of those and stuff like that. So you can have six of exactly the same document in there. Especially the next semester, you really don’t need it. That’s so

Brent Warner
Interesting. So, um, so Tim, you’re dealing with that quite a bit, I have never once had that problem. Because I have no files in my, in my campus.

Tim Van Norman
That’s because you use Google Drive, right, which is a great way to handle it, everything

Brent Warner
gets embedded. So like you can you can publish a Google Doc, and you can have an embed, and you can put, put the code directly into a Canvas page or to an assignment or whatever it is. And so students can all look at the Google Doc, and then any adjustments that I need to make, I can go right back to that Google doc itself, make the changes in there, and it already comes through on Canvas as well. So it’s an interesting thing that I totally recognize a lot of people have, because they’ve got their history of PDFs and all the other folders, and you know, PowerPoints and those types of things. But for me, since everything’s a Google Doc, or everything’s a Google slide, it’s just a matter of embedding it and just having a very light coding overall, because then all it’s doing is pulling it through into the page.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. So here’s a way to clean up files. Kind of what you talked about before and the very first one, create a folder and call it junk, call it to be deleted, whatever and don’t publish it. Oh, make it not published, and move everything you think might be junk into that folder. This is before the semester begins. Every time a student says hey actually Can’t, I’ve got this error every time you click on something and you don’t see it, drag that, that one image that one file and place it where it belongs in your folder structure. Okay, at the end of the semester, everything left in that unpublished junk folder is junk, delete it, just delete the folder, all of that goes away. And now the next semester, you don’t have all of those files. Love it, love it, so you’re not taking it with you. So just a nice way of cleaning it up. And, and stuff like that. Another thing that’s nice is with pages, so pages, you can do something kind of neat. And you could do this with assignments and stuff, too. But what you do is you have you unpublished your pages, and then you publish, make sure you’re using modules for everything for this to work in modules. Have the modules all unpublished. When you hit publish on the module, it will automatically publish everything in the module.

Brent Warner
Yes, I actually find that annoying

Tim Van Norman
Actually, I hate it. I 100% agree with you. But this is the one case useful. Okay, so now you publish all of your modules. Now you go back in and anything that’s not published, you don’t have a module. Okay, so you can look at it and you can go, oh, actually, I need this, where should it be? Or, oh, that’s garbage, and delete it, right. So it gives you the ability to go back in and clean things up at the beginning of the semester. You don’t want to do it in the middle of stuff with your students. But it as you’re looking at cleaning, cleaning up canvas that way just makes life a lot easier. And frankly, it’s gonna be faster running the next semester. And, and cleaner. Yeah.

Brent Warner
So I think we’ve covered a lot of different ways to tidy things up to clean things. Anyone listening, if you have your own hints, you can leave us a message on the on the show notes there on the higher ed tech podcast.com. But I think that’s a good start for everybody. So thanks so much.

Tim Van Norman
Thank you for listening today. In this episode, we talked about clearing the digital clutter. For more information about this show, please visit our website, thehigheredtechpodcast.com. There you will find our podcasts and show the information we’ve covered.

Brent Warner
And of course we always want your feedback. So please go to thehigheredtechpodcast.com and let us know your thoughts. If you have ideas for future shows, there’s a link over there where you can give us your topic ideas.

Tim Van Norman
For everyone ABC that’s listening. If you need help with technology questions, please contact IVC Technical Support at extension 5696 or by emailing IVC tech@ivc.edu. If you have questions about technology in your classroom, please contact me Tim Van Norman at tvannorman@ivc.edu.

Brent Warner
And if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on Twitter or Instagram at @BrentGWarner.

Tim Van Norman
I’m Tim Van Norman,

Brent Warner
and I’m Brent Warner and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Thanks, everybody. Take care