Keep your school's Stile library up to date and uncluttered.
The school library can be a great way to share customised Lessons and resources with your colleagues. It allows all teachers on your school's Stile account to share their resources, which is great in a heavily collaborative setting. The library can become cluttered, however, if it isn't maintained from year to year. Good library maintenance is something everyone can help with and will help ensure that no one is using outdated Lessons.
This article is designed to help you practice good library organisation, and to regain control of a school library that may have grown too big.
Continue reading below, or jump to the section that most interests you:
- Create and share from Planning/Sandpit Subjects;
- Use uniform naming conventions;
- Practice end-of-year cleanups;
- Contact the Stile Support team for a deep clean.
Create and share from Planning/Sandpit Subjects
A great way to ensure you keep your shared resources organised is to keep them all in the same Subject on your homepage. Rather than sharing Folders from Subjects where your students are working, or from Subjects that you may archive at the end of the year, keep a Sandpit or Planning Subject active where you can get creative.
This can be a student-free place where you safely work on building and customising Lessons without the risk of overwriting or deleting student work. Anything you share to the school library is organised under their Subject names, so if you plan to use your Sandpit as a place to share resources then give it a concise name such as Mr. McD's Resources or Yr 10 Biology Custom. Your colleagues will know where to find your resources in the library, and you'll know where to manage all your shared resources.
Use uniform naming conventions
If you expect a lot of teachers to use the school library, then you may want to agree on a uniform naming convention to keep everyone's contributions more organised.
If content is time-sensitive, for example if it is only relevant to Term 2 2023, include that in the Folder's name and remove the content when it's no longer useful.
Practice end-of-year cleanups
A great way to keep your library (and your homepage!) organised is to follow our end-of-year best practices. They're quick, low effort tips to make sure your library stays current and uncluttered, and it also helps to remove old Subjects from your view and from your students' view without deleting anything.
The best time to do this is at the end of the year when you've finished reports, or at the very start of the year before school resumes.
Contact the Stile Support team for a deep clean
Sometimes, especially in large schools, the library can run away a bit. Teachers who leave the school may not clean up their shared resources before departing; Subjects stick around long after they're useful; or the original source Folders get deleted without unsharing first. There's any variety of reasons why a library can become difficult to navigate, and often it's easiest to let us do the work for you!
Ask your school's Stile admin or Super Teacher to contact the Support team, and let us know what you would like to keep or to get rid of. This clean-up can be as broad or as specific as you like.
Some examples of cleanup requests include:
- Remove any resources from teachers who have left the school (please provide names);
- Remove anything with previous years in the title (e.g. 2017 Psychology);
- Remove specific Subjects (provide their titles or a screenshot of the library list);
- Keep X and Y and remove the rest!
There's no bad time to clean up your school library, so get in touch whenever you are ready and we can get to work quickly.
You may also be interested in the following resources: