I walk into class and what appears to be a multi-colored and slightly unstable tower sits on my CT’s desk. What ghastly student project is this? When did he assign the creation of multi-colored and slightly unstable towers? How do I miss these things?!
I walk closer and upon closer inspection I realize that this is no ordinary tower. No, not at all. This abomination is the entirety of the week’s handouts for 2 preps covering 7 classes. It looks like a small forest has been harvested for these…and this is just for one week!
At first I thought it was just my CT being wasteful with handouts but it turns out, it is really easy to really rack up the copies. Over the course of my two-week unit I probably made enough copies for my own tower.
I’m a big fan of being as paperless as possible. However, the education field seems to be the most resistant to that change. Paperless may be easier and most convenient for me– but then again, it’s not really about me is it? Until technology use in school and home becomes completely ubiquitous, I don’t really see the move toward paperless happening. However, that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try.
Here are some things I’m considering implementing over the course of my student teaching:
- Making email an option for submitting work
- Updating a classroom website with PowerPoint slides and links to homework and handouts
- Limiting the number of handouts I give in class
- Returning assignments as quickly as possible, thereby limiting how long I have to deal with paper
Does anybody else have any good ideas as to how I can tame the “paper beast” as a teacher?
Those are good ideas. If you have hosting space (something I’m highly considering) and access to technology, you can use Moodle for a number of different things, including journal posts, quizzes (and tests), uploading entries, hosting documents, etc. It’s a pretty useful tool.
I know that technology is somewhat limited for me – students don’t have the ability to access their E-mail at school (not even outside of school hours), so I can’t trust submissions that way. Being paperless is a good idea, but digital technology can have its own problems: for instance, what do you do if a student swears that they uploaded something, but it’s no longer there? Technology is awesome when it works and atrocious when it fails, so there will probably always be a balancing act.
Addendum: I guess it didn’t even occur to me that you’re probably hosting this blog, so you should have everything you need since you’re running Wordpress (PHP and MySQL). Again, highly recommended, and the installation is very easy, from what I recall.
[...] January 14 Mr. Spurlin apologizes for wasting paper in I’m Sorry Trees. I also love to reduce [...]
Okay, I am the negative nelly today. . . good luck reducing paper exoecially if you’re in a title 1 school. For me, I was told to cover my behind and that means holding on to excessive amounts of paper.
Some teacher’s at my school make classroom sets of things. They have the students copy the worksheet/handout onto their own paper. I found that this was too time consuming and collasal waste of time. There is NO WAY I could cover the amount of material that I do if student’s had to WRITE every single thing on their own. AND, you’re still USING massive amounts of paper doing this. . It’s just not on your desk anymore.