Home PublicationsL&LIssuesVolume 27 (1999-2000) October (No. 2)

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Using the metaphor of searching for a document in a file cabinet without folders helps students understand the significance of organizing files into folders on any of the storage media.

“Teacher, I can’t find my file.”

If I had a dollar for every time I heard a student say this, I could significantly enhance my retirement. In spite of my best efforts to teach students how to save their work in specific locations so they could easily locate and retrieve it, many of them never grasped the concept.

So when our school district introduced networked labs, I designed a tree graphic to help my students understand the organization of the network. This helped reduce the mystery of the missing file but did not eliminate it. Then about a year ago, I revived the tree idea as a tool to teach how to save individual work. However, this time three (or more) trees grow from one computer.

To help students understand the file organization on a disk drive, I duplicate a template and have them begin filling it in at the beginning of the term. (View and print a useable template. You may want to consider using the file as your desktop or wallpaper.) On Macintosh computers, I have students open the hard drive at the desktop level. On Windows computers, I have students open My Computer. In the blank space on the trunk of the tree, they write the drive name. Next they open that drive, and we discuss the various folders. They write the name of each folder on a branch of the tree.

Then they open one of the folders represented by a branch. If it contains folders, they label the folders hanging from that branch like leaves on a tree. They repeat the process until they have identified the contents of several branches on the tree.

Most computers have a hard drive as well as a floppy disk drive. On our graphic representation, a second tree can represent the floppy drive, and students label that tree accordingly. I use this opportunity to teach them about saving their files on a floppy disk as they create and label their folders.

A third tree can represent a network drive or other special drives that handle CD-ROMs and Zip or Syquest disks. (Depending on how many drives you have, you may need to add more trees.) After students label this tree, I discuss the importance of organizing material on large-capacity storage devices in folders. They learn that putting everything in one large directory or folder will significantly slow the retrieval of files as that directory or folder grows, both because it takes longer to process and display the contents of a large directory and because it takes longer for a user to scroll through a long folder.

Using the metaphor of searching for a document in a file cabinet with-out folders helps students understand the significance of organizing files into folders on any of the storage media. This strategy has helped solve the mystery of the missing file by reducing the need to use the “find file” function or, worse yet, hoping that some clue will occur to the student as to what his or her file is named. It allows me to concentrate on helping the students accomplish the instructional task at hand rather than searching for misplaced work.

Copyright © 1999, ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education). All rights reserved.