March Challenge: Making Paper Digital

Want to make paper clutter digital instead? There are so many advantages to doing this, as long as you don't need the physical paper copy. I have an example below in this post. I used to keep teaching and home decor magazines for the articles and pictures. I bought a HP wireless all-in-one printer back in August 2010 and absolutely love it. It has a document feeder on top, which I use all of the time, and is so useful. I have used my scanner to digitize all of my school handouts, magazine articles, recipes, mementos, etc. For me, keeping paper digitally on a backed up external hard drive works best. I like that I can take the files anywhere with me (especially the school files). Here's how I scan my files (of course, the process will be different with other scanners).

These pages are from Scholastic's Instructor magazines - one of my faves. I scan almost all of their articles from each issue. SO useful!

The papers get placed on the top feed tray (or can be placed on the inside glass to be scanned, on at a time.

On my computer I have the HP Solution Center software, which helps me scan pictures and documents into my computer. Documents scan in and save as PDFs, which is awesome because they can be opened on any computer. I select "Scan Document" from the menu.

On the scanning options window I select "Document to File" so it saves as a PDF and not a JPEG (which is for pictures). Then click "Scan".

The document will now begin to feed through the reader and start to show a preview as it's scanning.

Once the scanning is through, I can view all of my pages using the pictures in the bottom right corner. The large picture preview shows me the current page selected. Once the scanning is done, I can add more or delete pages, crop, change the quality, rotate, and rearrange page order.

When I am satisfied with the way my scanned images look, I click "Finish", which saves the files in a folder called "My Scans". I can then rename it to the article name. I love that it saves the files in the same place every time, that way I never lose files.

I then move the scanned file into my school folder. I have a folder in My Documents called "School" where I save all of my education files. Everything is categorized by subject, and each subject is categorized within that folder by concept. For example, the math folder contains addition & subtraction, fractions, graphing, multiplication & division, etc. Anything that is super grade specific, I'll include the grade at the beginning of the file name (for example, 3rd - Layered Curriculum - Ecosystems). I have had no problem finding files with my system. And if I do ever forget where I put something, I just go back to the mail "School" folder and use the search box to look for it.

I back everything up twice a month via an external hard drive that I keep in our safe. If anything were to happen to my computer, I wouldn't want to lose anything. I use Dropbox to sync my school files so I can access them at all times at school. I literally have thousands of files saved in this folder. Everything from worksheets to Teachers Pay Teachers units I've purchased to eBooks I buy on dollar sales at Scholastic Teacher Express.

So what do you think? Are you willing to give it a shot? Any scanner will do.