Where to keep your teaching materials — and how to get them to students

Materials accumulate the way photos do: quickly, invisibly, and without anyone deciding on a structure. A worksheet you made for one student in 2023 is genuinely useful for the one you took on last week — if you can find it, and if you remember it exists.

The absence of a system has a specific cost, and it is not storage. It is the ten minutes before a lesson spent searching, the third re-creation of a resource you already own, and the student who did not do the homework because the file was three days up a chat thread.

All four are in use by working tutors, and all four are fine up to a point. The point is what matters.

The difference between a library and a folder is not search — it is the connection to teaching. A file in a library can be attached to a lesson, sent as homework, and seen in the context of the student who received it.

That turns a pile of files into a record: which student got which resource, when, and whether they opened it. None of that exists in a folder, and reconstructing it from a chat thread is the sort of task people simply do not do.

Tutors conflate two actions that deserve different behaviour. "Here is the worksheet we are doing now" is reference material — it should be available, and nothing depends on it. "Here is your homework" is an assignment — it has a deadline, it should be chased, and whether it came back matters.

Keeping them distinct means your homework list stays a list of things actually outstanding, rather than everything you have ever sent. That is the difference between a list you check and one you stop opening.

A returned piece of work is the point at which most systems fall over: it arrives as a photo in a chat, gets looked at once, and is never findable again.

Attached to the assignment instead, it stays with the task and the lesson. Six weeks later, "have they actually improved on this?" is a question you can answer by looking rather than by remembering.

Any storage has limits, and it is better to meet them on purpose than during a lesson. Per-file size caps matter most for scanned PDFs and audio; total allowance matters if you scan whole textbooks.

The practical advice is dull and effective: compress scans before uploading, keep audio as links where you can, and do not use your library as an archive of things you will never use again.

Less than you fear. A tutor with a full roster and five years of accumulated worksheets is usually under a couple of gigabytes, because documents are small and the large things — video, textbook scans — are the ones you should not be storing anyway.

If you are over that, the cause is almost always uncompressed scans or duplicates of the same resource saved from three different chats.

Do not try to organise everything. Take the twenty resources you actually used this term, put them in the library with names you would search for, and leave the rest where it is.

The remaining files will sort themselves out by natural selection: anything you reach for gets added when you reach for it, and anything you never reach for did not need organising.

Store materials where they can be attached to a lesson, keep reference material and homework distinct, compress before uploading, and organise only what you use. The goal is ten seconds to the right file, not a perfect taxonomy.