At the start of every school year, there is an urge to grab whatever we started with last year and repeat it. It’s easy. It’s convenient. It doesn’t take a lot of time. And strangely, it’s partially helpful. But, only partially. Because every year we learn things, we grow, and we don’t want to spend the year on repeat. Are there simple, common things we need to start with every year? Maybe things we do once a year and forget again?

A couple of weeks ago, I helped train new school library assistants. When we had been tossing out ideas of things they should learn upfront, I casually suggested getting someone to teach them how to use their email correctly and to never “Reply All”. Yep, that’s all it takes to commit to 3 hours of training folks in small groups. It led me to realize that there were some key things to share with my faculty – both old and new to the school. What I am looking for are the simple but highly important items we tend to overlook. Every teacher needs to access their online LMS, set up their introduction, load their syllabus, and make sure they have access to the grade book. Beyond that, there are many simple things we can do to be ready for the school year.

Here are 5 items every teacher should know how to do:

• Set your signature on your email. (You’ve done it once, but you moved rooms. You need to update the room number and telephone extension in your signature. Do you remember how?)
• The Helpdesk phone number. (Find it, share it, write it down, and tape it on your phone.)
• Set up your voicemail. (Where did you put those directions??)
• Change your password (if you remember it from last year). [This shouldn’t be optional. We keep a lot online now. Change it to a unique password that is a minimum of 8 characters including letters and numbers. This is not the place to be lazy.]
• Laptop settings. (My laptop died this week and IT had to reinstall the operating system. The default time before the laptop screen goes to sleep is 4 minutes. Check yours so it doesn’t go to a black screen during class.)

What small but essential item do you consider necessary for the start of the school year?