Last year, I was able to take a hard look at our copying habits and copier needs at this school. I was dumbfounded when I learned the facts about the sheer volume of copies that are made here (at a Green School). We average more than 2.5 million copies per year with some individuals copying enough to reproduce complete textbooks per student in the first three months of the school year alone! The numbers are staggering, not to mention the frustrations this causes when copiers are down largely due to incredible use. What's even more vexing is that we live and work in a day and age where it is possible to run a virtually paper-free classroom (and perhaps a largely paper-free school).
At our fingertips, we all have online tools that would ease our dependency on paper:
Wikis
Google Docs
Class Management Systems such as Moodle or the Podium
Blogs
Turnitin.com
Drop Box
Word processing & email
And the list goes on....
I decided to post about this topic today because I recently read an article proclaiming that paper (use) had a negative impact on students. Specifically, a negative impact on students' willingness to edit, rewrite or revise their own work. The article quoted Tom Whitby, college professor and education blogger, as saying, "Word processing enables kids to write at a higher level, and they are more likely to make corrections and rewrites when using a word processor. We write in a word processing world and our students should learn in the same way." Now, I'm not 100% convinced by that argument. However, the article went on to talk about how likely kids were to want to revise work that they spent hours writing by hand. The question was posed: When was the last time you wrote anything of any length by hand? How likely would you be to want to rewrite all of it because one part needed changes or in order to make additions to content? Why would our students be any more inclined to do so?
So, are there ways that we could do more things online or using the tools that not only support our efforts to be a Green School, but are more conducive to revision and learning than hand written work and reproducibles? Let's challenge each other to find one innovation that we can use in our daily work to reduce our paper consumption and support 21st century skill-building during the 2012 calendar year!
To short answer your question, is of course yes. However, not all students do work on laptops, and those places where teachers post notes / handouts like Moodle may simply push the "printing" to the student rather than encourage paperless learning.
ReplyDeleteI'm hoping that soon we'll see powerful tablets with keyboards and software that allows handouts to be "active", such that students can make notes on the handout and keep track of ideas like Microsoft's Onenote, perhaps in an open source version available to all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_OneNote
This does however mean that all students would need a tablet - PC (real keyboard and a stylus). The environmental impact of replacing these every three years, however, likely is greater than recycled paper.