I had the privilege of co-moderating the 7/14/13 #CAEDCHAT about running a paperless classroom with Jen Roberts and Ryan Archer. The goal of the chat was to talk about the reasons why someone would go paperless and to have some teachers share their paperless journey.
Why go paperless?
There is an obvious ecological argument. As a classroom teacher I have the potential to use an astounding amount of paper in a day. Using round figures, if I have 3 handouts in a day and I see 100 students that is 300 pieces of paper. The standard school year has 180 days, so if 3 handouts is my average that is (180 x 300) = 54000 pieces of paper, in my room alone. If these students see 5 teachers in a day and they all have 3 handouts a day (54000 x 5)= 270,000. This assumes that the handouts are one page of course, so the real numbers are much higher. When I find a news story I want to share with my class it might be 12-15 pages long. With numbers like this, it isn't hard to see why we keep talking about paper usage at staff meetings.
Paper is woefully inefficient data storage. We use paper to store and transfer data. When I was talking to some teachers at ISTE I realized one of my biggest problems with paper has to do with workflow. When we create a paper-based document we create a document that takes a good deal of time to manage. Students have to retrieve the document one by one from the folder as they walk in the door. Worse yet they have to wait while I pass the document out. We have also created a document that can be easily lost or destroyed. Paper has no undo button. Once it is over-highlighted, crumpled in the bottom of a page, or eaten by the proverbial dog that is it, it is done. We have to return to the source and get another copy.
Paper is hard to transport. If you are an English teacher you can skip this part because you know there is no tote bag that will hold 40 student notebooks. As I watch the sea of turtles leave the school wobbling under the weight of their giant shells it is clear that one of 2 things needs to happen, we need to figure out how to make kids carry less paper, or we need to give them pack mules. When I think about the number of students who have left papers behind in my class or come to me asking for another copy because they can't find the first or second one I gave them, I know this transport issue is about more than just packing the work in and out of school. It is also about tracking the paper. While I know we need to teach kids to keep track of handouts and use folders efficiently, when I ask them to make sure they don't lose a handout, half of them take out their phones and take a picture of it.
Paper is not searchable. Although I am not an early adopter of Evernote, it is one of the few web services I pay my own money for and the reason I do that is the search function. I can keyword search my PDF library using Evernote. This is a great time saver to me. The model I am moving away from involves binders and sheet protectors. I would try to organize the handouts I was using in the class in these binders and store the extras with the originals in sheet protectors so I would not waste any and I could always find them. When I look at these binders at the end of the year I am always struck by how many handouts made it into the binder at the beginning of the semester and how much difficulty I had keeping up with my own system. Finding a handout in these binders typically relies on me remembering when I gave it out or what it looked like. I am becoming much more comfortable with a computers search function then my own ability to remember what a handout looked like. If I created a learning guide on comma usage and I type comma usage into my Evernote portal it can send me directly to the document. As a bonus the document has its own URL that I can embed on my class website or email to students.
A paperless classroom is more transparent. I found as I moved from handouts to documents I was talking more with parents about what was happening in my classroom and more of our learning was shared. By setting up a class web portal I not only made a spot my students could get the documents from class, I built a platform where parents could see what we were doing. When a student needs support on a paper or a project it is much easier for a parent to find the information on the class web page than it is to find the right handout in a backpack. This transparency was not the first reason I tried to go paperless, but it has added the greatest value to my class.
If you are thinking about going paperless, be sure to check out the archive of the #CAEDCHAT, lots of great thinking there. Also read this post by Jen Roberts about her paperless journey, she has great perspective and experience.
Another great post about going paperless by Robert Schuetz
Why go paperless?
There is an obvious ecological argument. As a classroom teacher I have the potential to use an astounding amount of paper in a day. Using round figures, if I have 3 handouts in a day and I see 100 students that is 300 pieces of paper. The standard school year has 180 days, so if 3 handouts is my average that is (180 x 300) = 54000 pieces of paper, in my room alone. If these students see 5 teachers in a day and they all have 3 handouts a day (54000 x 5)= 270,000. This assumes that the handouts are one page of course, so the real numbers are much higher. When I find a news story I want to share with my class it might be 12-15 pages long. With numbers like this, it isn't hard to see why we keep talking about paper usage at staff meetings.
Paper is woefully inefficient data storage. We use paper to store and transfer data. When I was talking to some teachers at ISTE I realized one of my biggest problems with paper has to do with workflow. When we create a paper-based document we create a document that takes a good deal of time to manage. Students have to retrieve the document one by one from the folder as they walk in the door. Worse yet they have to wait while I pass the document out. We have also created a document that can be easily lost or destroyed. Paper has no undo button. Once it is over-highlighted, crumpled in the bottom of a page, or eaten by the proverbial dog that is it, it is done. We have to return to the source and get another copy.
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| Photo by Zen Leprechaun on Flicker |
Paper is hard to transport. If you are an English teacher you can skip this part because you know there is no tote bag that will hold 40 student notebooks. As I watch the sea of turtles leave the school wobbling under the weight of their giant shells it is clear that one of 2 things needs to happen, we need to figure out how to make kids carry less paper, or we need to give them pack mules. When I think about the number of students who have left papers behind in my class or come to me asking for another copy because they can't find the first or second one I gave them, I know this transport issue is about more than just packing the work in and out of school. It is also about tracking the paper. While I know we need to teach kids to keep track of handouts and use folders efficiently, when I ask them to make sure they don't lose a handout, half of them take out their phones and take a picture of it.
Paper is not searchable. Although I am not an early adopter of Evernote, it is one of the few web services I pay my own money for and the reason I do that is the search function. I can keyword search my PDF library using Evernote. This is a great time saver to me. The model I am moving away from involves binders and sheet protectors. I would try to organize the handouts I was using in the class in these binders and store the extras with the originals in sheet protectors so I would not waste any and I could always find them. When I look at these binders at the end of the year I am always struck by how many handouts made it into the binder at the beginning of the semester and how much difficulty I had keeping up with my own system. Finding a handout in these binders typically relies on me remembering when I gave it out or what it looked like. I am becoming much more comfortable with a computers search function then my own ability to remember what a handout looked like. If I created a learning guide on comma usage and I type comma usage into my Evernote portal it can send me directly to the document. As a bonus the document has its own URL that I can embed on my class website or email to students.
A paperless classroom is more transparent. I found as I moved from handouts to documents I was talking more with parents about what was happening in my classroom and more of our learning was shared. By setting up a class web portal I not only made a spot my students could get the documents from class, I built a platform where parents could see what we were doing. When a student needs support on a paper or a project it is much easier for a parent to find the information on the class web page than it is to find the right handout in a backpack. This transparency was not the first reason I tried to go paperless, but it has added the greatest value to my class.
If you are thinking about going paperless, be sure to check out the archive of the #CAEDCHAT, lots of great thinking there. Also read this post by Jen Roberts about her paperless journey, she has great perspective and experience.
Another great post about going paperless by Robert Schuetz
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