Effective Strategies for Organizing and Planning Weekly Assignments (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Welcome to this guide on a few ideas for organizing your assignments. In this video, we will discuss how to organize yourself when getting started with your assignments. Do you sometimes struggle with where to begin for your weekly assignments? If you said yes, then you know how frustrating it can be to figure out where to get started, or more importantly, how to organize yourself for the week ahead of you. Let's begin by talking about using organization to help us plan out the assignments we have for the week. Each week, we have different assignments. It could be a discussion, a journal, a milestone, or a combination of these. It's important to begin by reviewing the discussion question or the rubric for the journal, milestone, or final project. Once we have done that, we will want to make sure that we read all the material in the module that will help us complete the assignment. Next, go ahead and copy and paste the discussion question or the critical element section of the rubric into a Word document. Be sure to make sure this is a different color so it's going to stand out from your writing, and also it will help you remember to delete this question once you're done brainstorming or organizing. Now we are going to start out by writing down just a few things to help us brainstorm and organize our thoughts to more effectively answer the question. In these few things, we are going to write down our first initial thoughts regarding the question. We're going to also write down some evidence to help support this initial idea that we have. And finally, we're going to make sure that we do our work cited or reference depending on the citation style that we're using. Let's look at an example of how this works. Let's say we read Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss, and we are focusing on this part of the question that asks us about the author's purpose. Maybe our first thoughts are that the author's purpose is to tell people to give things a try before deciding that they don't like it. Now these are just some first initial thoughts or ideas, so it might not be fully developed just yet, but as you work on it, it will become a more complete thought that will be ready to turn in. Next, we can take a direct quote or paraphrase or summarize something from our reading that will help us support the idea we have. This is also called evidence. Remember that at the end of the quote or paraphrase or summarize section that we'll want to make sure to include an in-text citation. Again, this strategy is a way to help us organize our thoughts as we are beginning the assignment. When we work more on this, we will come back to this section and develop an explanation as to why this particular quote or paraphrase or summarize section is going to support that idea that we wrote down in the first initial thoughts section. Finally, it's important to create a works cited or a reference. Creating this now will save us time later when we finish the assignment. Rather than using a little bit more time to go back at the end to create a works cited and reference and remember the actual resource that we used, we'll already have it done. In this video, we have discussed planning and organizing our assignments by writing down a few ideas using the prompt of a discussion or the critical element section of a rubric. Thank you for watching. We hope to work with you soon.