Going paperless

Article source: Teachers cutting paper usage; kids loving it, Hannah Sampson, Miami Herald, Mar. 27, 2009

Paper: eight and a half by eleven, usually white. As a (primarily) English teacher, I have a love/hate relationship with it. On one hand, I'm a shameless tree hugger who can't help but think about the senseless slaughter of trees. On the other, it often seems like the very purpose of school is to fill up about as much of the stuff as possible.

Back in my student teaching days, one of my cooperating teachers was definitely anti-paper. Other than quizzes, tests, the vocabulary templates she used (The Clarifying Table Routine), and the monthly master list of assignments, I don't recall seeing her use much paper (compared to many other teachers). She used an old-school overhead projector and had the kids do almost everything in their own notebooks, which they had to turn in periodically for a grade. She allowed kids to submit papers electronically, and even though it wasn't a computer-rich environment, more than a few kids took her up on it.

Just the other week, I was working at a school where they had totally run out of paper, so unless you had your own, no copies could be made. The assignment the teacher left for the kids to work on was a rather extensive one, but we had to make do. I took the original, posted it up on the Elmo, told the kids they'd just have to "copy off the board" and when the whining ensued, told them they could get right on over it.

Paper is the bane of my existence. It's easily lost or misplaced, it can be expensive, it requires a level of organizational prowess that I really have to work at, and it tends to multiply like rabbits.

"In classrooms...paper is becoming more of a relic than an educational staple. The result: homework done online. Paperless term papers. Math problems completed on an interactive whiteboard. An entire course of physics problems contained on a single compact disc. And, schools hope, savings in an ever-tightening budget crunch."

Eliminating the paper trail, so to speak, certainly can be done in a lot of different ways. I have seen some really good teacher websites with the option for students to complete and submit homework online.

During student teaching, for example, when my students submitted their mid and final drafts during a huge writing project, all I did was come around with my flash drive and save a copy (for their rough drafts, I made them do a paper copy because most of them were so enthralled with Word Art that they would easily waste an hour trying to design the most visually pleasing title font that they could).

In English, at least, there's a lot to be said for doing much of the work of writing on the computer. There's also an equally compelling argument for eliminating much of the workbook and drill and practice work (worksheet exercises). There's lots of really good interactive online quizzes on grammar, vocabulary, and so forth that students could do easily at school or home (provided that they have the resources--I realize that not everybody does). Kids spend most of their time on the computer either playing games or cracked out on YouTube, so why not harness all this energy and put it to work in favor of learning? You couldn't really replace all of your classwork with electronic practice unless you are lucky enough to teach at one of those fancy schools where every student in the room has easy access to a computer.

While I'm talking mainly about my experience teaching language arts and ESL, this works equally well in other subject areas. I taught middle school math for a month once, and we did almost everything on whiteboards or on a chalkboard. I carried one around myself while working with individual students because I could easily show them the steps to solving the problems very easily that way. Homework, of course was still done on paper, but there's ways to keep that from getting too out of hand.

"While schools would be hard-pressed to eliminate paper altogether, technologies like interactive whiteboards and document projectors have proven to be popular substitutes."

Document projectors are awesome. This has to be one of the best inventions to hit the educational circuit. In fact the only downside I can think of, really, is the fact that the kids discover (only too quickly) how to use the freeze function...but then again, is that so much worse than the endless parade of amateur shadow puppetry?
I absolutely love the fact that you can project ANYTHING up on a board--student work, pages from a textbook, lists, exemplars, whatever you want. I've never been privileged enough to work in an environment where interactive whiteboards were available, but I can only imagine how wonderful they must be.

"Strauss keeps track of how many copies teachers are making and sends a note (e-mail, of course) to those who have fewer than 500 per month with ''a thank you for thinking green and helping the budget,'' he said. Those who exceed 2,000 copies in a month get a note urging them to reconsider their paper-dependent ways."

This reminds me of colleges and their print quotas. I think it's high time they did this in K-12 settings. Some teachers can be real profligates when it comes to the copier...

"Christopher Stella, who teaches a fourth- and fifth-grade class at the school, posts to his class website all the information he might have otherwise sent home with kids on paper. Documents for homework are scanned and posted as PDF files."

One of the best arguments for reducing the paper load is that many parents would be considerably happier if they had the option of receiving school information electronically. That way it couldn't be "lost" (or deliberately withheld).

"MAST Academy in Key Biscayne, a school known for its focus on green innovation, tries to conserve paper -- and recycles what gets used."

Schools are getting a lot better about recycling, I've noticed. I use recycled paper from the copier room recycling bin for almost everything I do in classrooms with students. I use a lot of quarter and half sheets for stuff too--a lot of the time, you don't need a whole page for short answer activities, and a lot of kids find the "smaller is better" approach less threatening.

Today I was in a middle school classroom, and observed a math teacher, who was implementing a new routine to reduce his paper load. He passed out a pile of shiny new notebooks and instructed his students (6th graders) to start doing all of their homework in the new notebooks (no more turning in loose papers). They would be turned in and graded once a week (on staggered days). This reminded me of one of my cooperating teachers who had a similar system, that I really liked because it was very easy to manage. Not too long ago, I created something similar for a 7th grade student--a personal math homework notebook--we'd take his worksheets, cut out each problem, tape it to the page, and he would do his work in the notebook-instead of on the worksheet itself. So instead of losing worksheets, he had everything neatly contained in a single location, with the additional benefit of having more space to show his work (the goal here wasn't saving paper, but rather organization).

"Robert Rosen...scanned all of the information he hands out -- which would amount to something like 200,000 copies for all of his classes -- and put it on compact discs.
''The kids just loved the CD,'' he said. ``They just warmed up to the idea immediately.'' If there's something Rosen wants to distribute to students during the school year that wasn't included in the initial disc, he puts it on his website as a PDF."

As you can see, there's a lot of ways to cut down or eliminate a lot of the "paperwork" in education--or at least better organize what you have. Whether its simply reusing more paper, eliminating the use of worksheets, or using features like electronic submission, there's a lot of ways to save those trees.

http://www.miamiherald.com/457/story/968145.html