Math Bytes

Units of Measure in the 21st Century

It's always been a source of great consternation to me, that mathematics benchmarks around the world still appear to be completely oblivious of the implications of the impact of digital technologies in the world of mathematics.

To see explicit evidence of this, you need look no further than the Mathematics benchmarks that are currently used for the teaching of measure, which are still confined purely to units which, while still useful, are no longer the most common units of measure that are are significant in the lives of people who rely upon digital technologies in their daily lives. That means most of us, especially if you're reading this.

Why is it that in schools that are blessed with the ubiquitous provision of digital technologies, one-to-one laptops and iPads, the students never learn anything about how file sizes and the measurements of file sizes work?

There are two main reasons for this as far as I understand it:

• Almost universal ignorance on the part of teachers, more of whom are still largley completely oblivious of the difference between a megabyte and gigabyte. 
• An assumption that a generation of digital natives just automatically get this stuff, trust me, they don't. 
• A somewhat naive assumption that if there is a subject area that will remain unaffected by the influence of digital technologies it has to be mathematics. 

Teach Maths for your present, and their future not your past... 

Ask yourself, how can it make any sense in this day and age for students to be able to complete their mathematics education, competent in the calculations relating to kilograms and kilometres and millimetres and litres, but not have the slightest clue about the units of measure that are fundamental to the devices that they rely on every day?

The problem is caused by this... lack of awareness are profound. I don't know of any students who find themselves in difficulty is because they were confused about the difference between a metre and a kilometre, but I regularly encounter students and teachers who are flummoxed by their their inability to understand how big a megabyte is and why they can't email that 200MB video that was ‘rejected by the server'.

Fortunately, the solution is obvious; educate the teachers and they will educate the students, but unfortunately it looks like these things will not change until the ‘official, mandatory' benchmarks change. If anything this post is a desperate plea for just a bit of common sense; do you really need a mandatory benchmark for you to realise that in this day and age it is absolutely essential that our teachers, and their students, are as familiar with kilobytes and megabytes, as they are with metres and kilometres?

One extremely rare example of digital measures in Maths - Khan Academy

Trust me, it's not that difficult, if anything it’s actually easier to understand than traditional units of measure. When teaching measurements of length students have two differentiate between tens and hundreds and thousands, but when dealing with units of measure for file size, it's much simpler, everything is 1000 times bigger than anything before. That's it.

Put your practice where your pedagogy is...

So, inspired by Khan Academy, I put my my practice where my pedagogy is, I ran a lesson with a grade 5 class, with the single goal of demonstrating how easy it is to enable students to get to grips with this fundamental unit of measure. Essential to this was simplicity, and I know of no technoogy that is simpler to use, and as transformative in application as an effectively used 'wiki' space. In this case, as a GApps school, we used a Google Site, but any kind of online fora will suffice, more on the power of online 'interthinking' via wiki spaces here.

As with all of these kinds of lessons, most of the work goes into formulating a decent provocation, one that is not too narrow, otherwise all you get is 22 responses that are pretty much identical, as every student just imitates or duplicates the previous response. The prompt below shows how this can be avoided. In terms of 'doability' this task took me about 15 minutes to set up, and while I was able to complete the activity within one lesson, and one homework, to be honest it could have run for a week if I'd let it.


Prompt:

It was immediately apparent how natural this online environment is, and as can be seen in the clip below, far from being a screen dominated task, it stimulated a great deal of (on task) discussion and collaboration.  Remember these kids wrestle (without any help from teachers or textbooks) with file size every day, so asking them to envisage scenarios that use these quandaries as problem solving situation is not a big deal.

Just one example of interthinking in this lesson...

Interthinking - online and offline

It's important to note that, while the activity is screen centred, the learning is not confined to the screen, the students were just an animated (I reckon more so) than they would have been if this has been presented to them as a worksheet (which it could). But the transformative difference here is that moving it to a web based interactivity (not just an activity—see what I did there ;)?) facilitates the leverage of the transformative elements of SAMMS:

Access: They can easily search for clarification on specific elements they find confusing, such as units they want to consider that are not in the prompt (petabytes anyone?) particular vocabulary, or clarification about the amount of storage associated with particular contexts they wish to consider, eg the capacity of their smartphone, their games console, memory card, tablet etc.

Mutability: In response to feedback (from peers and their teacher), students can easily duplicate and revise their posts and post a second post (by effectively 'replying' to themselves) that shows clear evidence that relevant criticisms have been resolved.

Multimodality: Of course this entire medium is multimodal, if we had had another lesson, this activity could have been expanded to allow students to incorporate image, audio and video.

Socially Networked & Situated: As it is online, we can facilitate a P2P homelearn (as opposed to homework) activity. Assign assessment buddies to feedback on each others posts at home, of course the teacher can now easily monitor the quality of these online interactions, and interject, support, clarify, redirect as necessary.

I've included some examples below that illustrate how powerful this task was, and how easy it is to set up. 

Note that a great deal of the conversation (on screen and next to it) centred on wider mathematical concepts that would be relevant to the teaching of traditional units of measure, eg appropriate use of units, conversion of units, and that old favourite, explain your thinking... Now that's what I call a #winwin

Below you can find a PDF of the original discussion in it's entirety, bear in mind that this is not the actual discussion, which continues to develop following this capture.

Learning Journals, Google Sites, & ePortfolios

Learning Journals in the Junior School

Our Master Google Site - All Learning Journals start off like this.

All Primary School students at UWCSEA Dover have 'ePortfolios', although we prefer the term Learning Journal (LJ). This post is not about that important distinction, for more on the pedagogical rationale for why we use Learning Journals see my other post about this. This post is more about the how and the why of our organisation of these, than it is about the many reasons for their existence.

Our students in the Infant School do not curate their own LJs (yet) so we use a system where teachers can curate content for students into online albums, for more on that process and setup see my post on Learning Journals in the Early Years. 

Platform Choice

We wrestled long and hard with this, ultimately as a GApps school it makes sense to stay inside the Google domain, and our choices come down to Blogger or Google Sites. If you're interested in the pros and cons, see the doc I set up to share perspectives on this with other tech coaches, but the main thing to consider is that the aim was to fairly consider all options, and then to choose the platform that works best for journaling and capturing learning. Blogger is great for simplicity, and ease of sharing, especially with parents, but when it comes to easily being able to insert content from Google Drive, and PDFs, Google Sites was easily our platform of choice. We still wrestle with the fact that parents often find themselves on the 'outside' of our Google Apps domain, unable to see some content, as students have to specifically manage the share settings for everything that they insert, yes this can be a pain (made a lot easier by using the Hapara Teacher Dashboard), but, as is often the case with these things, it is also an essential '21st Century skill' - managing who can see what you post online. So rather than seeing this as a problem, see it as an opportunity. 

Google Site Considerations

We've been using Google Sites as Learning Journals for few years now, and it's going well, but we've made a few changes in light of classroom practice that have been very important. If you want the benefit of our hindsight, read on:

Design the master site, and design it well, this 'sets the tone', and it is almost impossible to change once you've copied one for each of your students, so plan it very carefully. In particular don't allow your assumptions about paper portfolios to influence your options too heavily. These LJs are digital, and as such they should be designed to make the most of the affordances of digital technologies, which I sum up as SAMMS—Situated, Accessible, Mutable, Multimodal, and Socially networked.

Ours is built based on the following considerations:

• Colour theme that matches our existing school palette, it should feel 'official'
• By all means design it around a paper portfolio model (we did, hence our subject divisions) but be open to changing this when you realise that a digital portfolio has affordances that make many of the assumptions behind the organisation of a paper portfolio obsolete. Such as:
• Use a 'rollover' model, we tried a new site each year, but it's impractical. Only new students get new sites, every one else takes their LJ with them from year to year.
• Make every page a mini 'blog' by using the 'announcements template' this way the LJ is a series of connected blogs, more than a website per se. 
• Make the 'front page' count, in terms of 'screen real estate' this is the most important part of the LJ (this is definitely not the case with a paper portfolio!). 
• So, the front page for our LJs is the most important part of the LJ, it is the place where the students post anything about their lives and their learning that does not fit within the boundaries of the subject tabs. This grows every year, but is probably best summed up by a focus on the 4 of our 5 elements that are not academic: activities (as well hobbies/holiday activities), outdoor education, PSHE, and Service. Increasingly some students are using this as a space to 'blog' in the more traditional sense, ie use it as a kind of diary, 'My doggy ate my Barbie'.
• Keep it simple, the mutability of the screen means the students can easily add what you/they need, and even restructure if necessary. Don't over complicate things, they can (and will) change it anyway if they want to.
• Break free of the 'once a term' share restrictions of paper, these are screen based so sharing is much easier, share little and often—literally every completed post can be shared with the family with a simple email, make the most of it. Parents would much rather get a post a fortnight than a deluge of content once every few months.

Exemplar Learning Journals

It's important to keep a focus on what works, and what doesn't, each year we capture one per grade that is above average, (we want something for teachers and students to aim for) but one that represents what most students were able to create over the course of the year, here's one from a Grade 4 student.

Grade 4 Learning Journal

One More Thing...

Students can change the template design, although we ask them to leave the layout alone; we put a lot of thought into the structure, so allowing the students to rip it to bits really undermines all the thought that went into its design. No doubt as time goes by, and our students have a more profound understanding of the structure of the LJ, they may of course make structural changes, but—and this is critical—we discourage students from getting distracted by website customisation (with varying degrees of success). Many do customise their LFs, and no doubt get a great deal of pleasure from it, example here:

But it's important that students understand that time spent redesigning their LJ is 'extra curricular' and not something they can justify spending time on when they are supposed to be creating a LJ post that is focused on the curriculum. That said, the process for customising a Google Site is not a simple one, it never ceases to amaze me how effectively these students have empowered each other to make quite complex changes to their LJs, without a teacher ever being consulted. I guess this goes to show two things—our students certainly feel ownership of their Learning Journals, and even if we wanted to stop them, we are unlikely to succeed... 

Hard Drive Full? Stressed about Storage?

Now we have switched to MacBook Airs with 'only' 250 Gigabytes of hard drive space (as opposed to the 500 Gigabytes in a MacBook Pro), some teachers are finding that they are running out of storage space, this post is to help you deal with it.

Before you do anything, do the easiest things first:

• delete the contents of the download folder
• empty the trash (including the trash in apps like iPhoto)
• in iMovie, delete the projects, and the related events from projects you have finished with, and don't let them build up...

First and foremost you need to understand that 250 Gigabytes is a LOT of space, the problem is that many, if not most teachers still fundamentally do not really understand how big a gig is.

How big is a Gig?

A kilobyte is about one page of text, a megabyte is a 1000 times bigger, about one digital photograph, and a gigabyte is a 1000 times bigger than that, like one high definition full length movie.

So a Gigabyte (Gb) is a 1000 times bigger than a Megabyte (Mb), and a 1000 times smaller than a Terabyte (Tb). What? I have explained this in more detail in another post, but maybe one of these analogies will help, trying to represent everyday sizes that are 1000 times bigger as you move up the scale:

How many rice sack sized files do you need? [Click to enlarge]

How many elephantine sized files do you need? [Click to enlarge]

How many suitcase sized files do you need? [Click to enlarge]

So with 250 sacks of rice/elephants/suitcases worth of storage (250 Gigabytes) on your MacBook Air to use, how can you be low on space? A few reasons:

• You transferred everything from your previous computer, chances are you need about 20% of that.
• You have loads of video hiding in your iPhoto library.
• You have load of video clogging up your iTunes Library.
• You have a load of video files languishing in folders on your Mac, maybe on your desktop, or somewhere else... 

By now you may have noticed a pattern forming, the main culprit is video. If you have a recent model of smartphone it is likely (whether you realise this or not) that you are recording in 'high def', tech speak for very high quality, and there is no easy way to change this. All you need to know is that just 1 minute of video can easily be 200 Megabytes, that's 200 bags of rice, or 200 cats, or 200 carry on cases of storage space. That's insane, and yes, this will eat up your hard drive capacity faster than a Panamanian termite mandible strike.

Solutions?

Get rid of most/all of your video, if you don't want to delete it, then move it to an external hard drive* how? Well it's most likely buried in the following locations:

There's probably loads of video in your iPhoto library, but how do you collate it all in one place? To view all of the video in iPhoto, create a 'smart album', instructions here, where you create an album which only shows 'photos' that are movies—yes, you're right, that does not make much sense, but it works. This will allow you to view all the video you have in iPhoto in one album, then you can either select the lot and drag it to a folder on an external hard drive, or delete it (hold down option + command, then hit the delete key).

If you're keen on buying/renting video via iTunes, or even importing video into iTunes so you can play it on an Apple TV*, get in the habit of removing it when you've watched it. My advice is not to use video in iTunes at all. Anther storage hog in iTunes are all apps stored in the iTunes folder if you sync an iOS device with your laptop, you can remove these as they're all stored in the App Store for you anyway.

Use your Time Machine back up drive (You do have one, right?) for extra storage, this can be used as a normal harddrive, just don't put anything in the database folder called 'backups.backupdb', the rest can be used as you like. In Time Machine preferences you should exclude non-essential folders from the backup process, such as Google Drive, Dropbox and the Downloads folder.

Search & Destroy

In the Finder (if you're confused by this just click on your desktop—assuming you can still see it), press Command and F to bring up a custom search, which you can tweak to focus only on file size, this is a great way to find massive files lurking in obscure parts of your hard drive:

Choose 'This Mac', change 'Kind' to 'Other', then pick File Size from the menu. Now tweak the parameters, I'd start with greater than 50 MB, right click the menu bar and choose Size from the list, click on this to sort all your files with the biggest at the top. Now start deleting. Command+delete keys are a easy way to quickly delete things, you'll still need to empty the bin when you're finished.

Use 'cloud' (online) storage instead... 

Now we have more cloud storage than you can throw a thumbstick at, you can store more online—but remember that one day you will leave UWC, and when that happens you're back to 'normal' cloud storage space—'unlimited storage is only for educational (gapps) domains, not private Google accounts.

If you are going to store loads of content in the cloud, eg Dropbox, Google Drive et al, you can easily find yourself with more content in the cloud than you have space for on your computer (Google Drive is 1 Terabyte now, that's a LOT of elephants) which means you won't be able to simply sync it all with your hard drive, instead you can use selective sync, to only sync the folders you choose, here's how it looks in Google Drive, similar options are available in Dropbox as well:

Files you don't have permission to edit will not be 'syncable'.

Choose what you use, and change these to reflect your changing priorities.

*Finally, if you're someone who absolutely NEEDS to have massive amounts of storage handy, all the time, everywhere, then maybe it's time for you to move into true nerd territory, and go for a Laptop Hard Drive Backback solution, yes, there is one, in fact there is more than one.

*Importing video into iTunes just so you can watch it on your Apple TV? No need, just download Beamer, and bypass iTunes completely,  just drag and drop from anywhere, including an external hard drive; even better it plays any video file, not just the video files iTunes likes.

Search (Your Mac) Smarter

Sort your Life Out

It's all well and good being a Google Ninja, but what good is that if you can't find the files you want on your own computer?

Files vs Folders

Less is More when it comes to folders (or 'directories' as some techie types like to call them).

So create FEWER folders, with MANY MORE files in them, treat them more like storage bins than sleeves - and only create folders when you have a bundle of files to actually put in them, trying to create folders BEFORE you have files is a pointless exercise in clairvoyance and confusion if you ask me. The other problem with 'folderitus' is the tendency to amass a load of duplicate files, files with exactly the same name that have placed in different folders. If they'd been in one huge folder, you would have been alerted to the duplication.

Stop treating folders like document sleeves...

Treat folders like storage crates - Less with More inside

So – oh look, you have a load of files do with planning that unit on Zen Buddhism and Karaoke? Fine, NOW create a folder, and dump them in there, but remember this, file names are much more important than folders. Some people *gasp* have even stopped creating folders AT ALL!! They just name their files with smart titles with useful keywords, and that's it ...

Start using file names that use useful keywords - so instead of calling that document 'Planning' how about ... 'Planning Zen Buddhism and Karaoke' now when you do a search you have a far greater likelihood of actually finding what you want.

Otherwise for example, a search for 'planning' could produce a load of files with identical names...

Sort out your Sorting

So when you have a bunch of files on display in your finder, make sure you take advantage of the button which lets you 'change item arrangement' pick whatever option will make it easiest to move the files you want to the top - I personally find the 'Date modified' to be the most useful.



For a more thorough break down and even more awesome advice for becoming a Finder Afficionado click here.

Mac Basics: The Finder - Apple Support Website

So... now that you know how to search your Mac, all you need to do is the same in your Google Drive...

Say NO to Vertical Video!

VVS (Vertical Video Syndrome) caused by vertically recorded video seems to be becoming an epidemic, you can make a difference, just say NO to vertical video!

I frequently encounter video editing catastrophes where students and teachers attempt to successfully edit vertical video, it doesn't go well, generally the only solution is to reshoot the video. Think about it, the most likely situation where your audience will view your video is on a laptop, a desktop computer or or a television—none of these can be rotated to a vertical (portrait) orientation to aid viewing. So it make no sense at all to record video that does not work for the majority of contexts where it will be viewed.

It's important to always hold your smartphone/tablet horizontally (landscape) when recording video.

Explain Everything (with Google Drive)

Using Explain Everything with Google Drive on the iPad is an incredible combination. It's not always a great idea to ask students to work from blank screens, it's often useful to give them all a head start by setting up a slide or two for them.

This way they focus on the learning intention, rather than wasting time faffing about with finding the right image, or typing in text that you've just written on the board.

Here's a short video to show you the process:

As you can see from the video the steps are as follows:

1. On your iPad in Explain Everything, set up the slides you want your class to start with.
2. When it's ready, export the project to your Google Drive as a project (not as a video), it will be an xpl file. 
3. You should be able to save it straight into any folder in your Google Drive, like a folder you've already shared with your class.*
4. Now you can just ask your students to open the file in their Google Drive app, when they do, they'll have the choice to open it with an app, they choose Explain Everything, 
5. That's it, now they have their own copy in Explain Everything, ready to learn.

Method #2

Unfortunately (at time of typing) an update from Google Drive has rendered the above steps redundant... :(

The good news is that the good folks at Explain Everything have provided an alternative workflow that is not very different:

1. On your iPad in Explain Everything, set up the slides you want your class to start with.
2. When it's ready, export the project to your Google Drive as a project (not as a video), it will be an xpl file. 
3. You should be able to save it straight into any folder in your Google Drive, like a folder you've already shared with your class.*
4. Go to the Explain Everything home screen and choose the 'document' icon from the top left corner. 
5. Select GDrive and they can find the project in the shared folder.
6. That's it, now they have their own copy in Explain Everything, ready to learn.

*It doesn't have to go in a folder, if you want you can just share the project file directly with the class, just as you would any other  file/Google doc.

Desktop Zero - 4 compelling reasons to make this a good habit

Yes, this is mine. No I did not cheat, well maybe one folder... 

You don't need me to tell you that your environment affects your productivity. Since a great deal of our work is now done with a screen, it stands to reason that your desktop environment can play an important role in your productivity. Seriously can you really look me in the monitor and tell me that you'd rather work on a desktop that looks like, this?

Messy Desktop by RuthOrtiz

Five Reasons to Change

There are plenty of reasons for making the effort to aim for 'desktop zero':

It is Irresponsible. 

Desktop etiquette - every teacher is a role model, and as a teacher, every time you share your desktop with your students, you demonstrate to them the kinds of organisational and work habits you expect them to imitate. As it happens, one of the essential elements of our UWCSEA Profile, is self management, specifically:

Take responsibility for directing one's learning.
Related concepts: metacognition, independence, perseverance, diligence, organisation, responsibility
Aspects of being a self-manager:

• use metacognitive skills to define learning goals, monitor progress, reflect and adjust their approach to improve learning

• independently and safely work towards a goal without direct oversight

• organise and manage time and resources

Everytime we share a cluttered desktop with a class, or even with parents, we effectively also share our inability to self manage, our lack of organisation, perseverance, diligence, need I go on? The biggest problem is that all of these behaviours are built on bad habits, but these are bad habits I see teachers (and parents) passing on to their children every day.

It is Insecure.

Ironically one of the most common reasons I hear for storing files on the desktop, is their critical importance, 'those are files I need, and I can't afford to lose them...' Really? Because unless you are in the habit of fastidiously backing up your Mac with Time Machine, like every day (in which case you are probably already at Desktop Zero, or close enough), you run the risk of losing it all, one hard drive failure, and that's it, all gone. Desktop files, are the most common space/place where data is lost in my experience. If those files had been placed in a Google Drive folder (or DropBox) then they would have been safe. literally every edit, backed up, in real time—but nothing on your desktop (and your students, if they're imitating you) is being backed up to the cloud, nothing.

Top Tip -  on the Mac, you can create an Alias (right click, or command+option drag and drop) from any 'buried' folder/file so there is a shortcut or alias of it on the desktop, it acts just like the real thing (the parent folder) but with the advantage that it's really ensconced safely within a cloud backed up folder. 

It is Inefficient.

Your computer's desktop is a starting point for your entire computing experience, but—like anything else—if you let it get cluttered your productivity will take a dive, and your stress levels will rise; few things are as frustrating as you or our students not being able to find that file exactly when you/they need it, especially if that entails creating it again... and again... Next time you save a file to the desktop, wouldn't it be nice to be able to find it immediately, and not have to engage in an insanity inducing file hunting game of 'Where's Wally'.

Clean-desk-high-productivity-toblender.com [modified]

It literally impedes

Because of the way OS X's GUI (graphical user interface) works, the icons on your desktop take up a lot more of your resources than you may realise... Just remember that every single icon on your desktop is actually a small transparent window with graphics (the icon) inside, so if you have, say, 100 icons on your desktop you have 100 windows open, each one stealing memory. And no, dumping them all in folder doesn't really help much, the fact that there is 2764 files in ONE folder, still means that OS X will still have trouble handling one folder with that many files in it..

Computer Desktop & Table Desktop

When we work with students on this, we are attempting to inculcate good habits, habits that will last a lifetime, one such habit is to work from desktop zero, an analogy we find helpful is for them to treat their computer desktop the same as they treat their table desktop in their classroom, as busy as it can get in the course of a normal working day, every day before they go home they are expected to return that space to what is effectively desktop zero 'IRL' (in real life). Everything gets put in it's right place, whether they have finished with that project or not, it goes in the appropriate folder. The difference being with computers being that you can actually work in files while they are in the folder, there's no need to take it out, and so need to put it back, this is why Desktop zero on a computer is easier than desktop IRL. In the same way when you place a folder in the appropriate folder (in Google Drive in the Finder) you can leave it there, and work on it while it is in there.

So, with this in mind, you shift your conception of the role of the desktop, the desktop becomes a temporary, easy to locate, grab, upload, rename "I need it in ten minutes or so" dumping ground. I only use my desktop as a temporary holding place for files I'm working with. Nothing remains there past the end of the day.

Cluttered desk via abcnews.com (Getty Images)

Upgrade Your Workflow

In actual fact the desktop is a folder, it's just a folder that you start from, and while it can function as a storage folder, as so many people have unfortunately proven, that is not its purpose. It was only created as an allegory so people would have something analog to relate the new digital experience to, just like the trash can in the corner‚we don't really keep tiny trash cans on the corner of our table tops, but it functions as an approximate analogy. And like most analogies, it has it's limits. One way forward is to start working the way you do when you use an iPad or similar device. 

New OSes like iOS and Android have thankfully ditched the "file icon sandbox" idea. The only things you are presented with when you look at your device is a launchpad for apps and services. Your data is invisible and agnostic and available only when you are in a program that knows how to display or use it, and you know what? It works just fine, no desktop, no clutter. 

Become more app oriented and less file oriented

In iOS, if you're working on a file, you start by opening the App, then you locate the file from within that App, well the exact same method works on the desktop. Working on a Word document? Don't look for the file first, open Word, then you will easily find any recent files in the recent files view. All you need to is drop down the menu bar 2 spaces from Open, to Open Recent—there that's not so hard is it?

Open Recent, don't just Open.

You will find the same feature in any application you use. Trust me. These are conventions that are cross-platform, that means you will be able to take advantage of this workflow no matter what computer or platform you ever use. Invest in this skill now, and you will reap the rewards for the rest of your life.

File less, search and sort more

I've written about this in more detail, with illustrations here, spend less time creating and organising folders (although that is important too) and make sure you name your files with keywords you can search for. On all your devices now instant search is everywhere, and on your Mac, you can search in literally any folder you open, from 'All my Files' to 'Documents' if it's in there, somewhere, search will find it, regardless of the folder it's in, but that's no use if the file is called 'Untitled.doc' or "Screen Shot 2015-03-14 at 5.38.12 am". Rename it, then move it.

Sort out your Sorting

When you have a bunch of files on display in your finder, make sure you take advantage of the button which lets you 'change item arrangement' pick whatever option will make it easiest to move the files you want to the top - I personally find the 'Date modified' to be the most useful, but there are options there for everyone.

Illustration by Ben Wiseman via nytimes

Don't procrastinate you can do it today!

The solution is not to just create another folder (which is actually inside the folder which is the desktop) and dump them all in there, it just means you've buried the problem. By all means dump all the files in a (cloud connected) folder (or 3 or 4), just make sure you've deleted the files you won't need again (hold down command then press delete to speed this up), and give the ones you do need a name you can search for (this has never been easier, now that in Yosemite you can rename a load of files in one go, just using right click). Once you've done that you'll probably find there are 'themes' forming that lend themselves to folders, but don't let that be an excuse to procrastinate, as you can always change your mind later, computers are convenient like that... 

Clean desk[top] policy via awanbee.com