The Paperless Classroom

I can't stand paper.

Now don't get me wrong, there are uses for paper that I think are fantastic. Books for example. I am a tech geek but I will tell anyone who wants to listen that computers will never replace books, at least not for enjoyment. The feel of the cover, the smell of the paper, the zen of quietly turning from page to page. Reading a book is a joyful experience, one that staring at a screen and scrolling through "pages" cannot replace. If that were the only use for paper in the world it would be worth keeping around. What would Christmas be without colorfully wrapped paper? Colds would be truly miserable and messy affairs without tissues for ones nose, and do I even need to get into it's importance in the bathroom? So again, paper has it's place. I just wish that place wasn't my classroom.

I have been so very happy since getting into teaching 4 years ago. My list of complaints is very short, but at or near the top is paper. There are file cabinets filled with it and piles of it on my shelves. By the second week it is bursting out of students desks as if it's desperately attempting to escape. I sit before piles of it almost every day in that beloved exercise known as "correcting" and then I spend hours each week laboriously handing it all back so the majority of it can be lost or ignored once it arrived at home (my favorite quote from a parent at conferences - "folder? My son has a folder?"). It is the bane of my educational existence and I wake each morning hoping it will have somehow gone away. After looking around a bit, I have found there are a growing number of people who feel the same way. Thankfully they are being more proactive than me and are attempting to do something about it. The paperless classroom is not here yet but it is a work in progress. there is hope, oh paper buried masses!

When the question of a paperless classroom comes up, one of the biggest questions is: Is a totally paperless classroom possible? On the face of it, the answer, right now, is probably no if for no other reason than the fact schools have made enormous investments in textbooks. Despite the efforts of places like California few schools could afford to simply scrap them. (At the same time, even the demise of textbooks look very possible as Internet and technology tools have more and more teachers instructing less and less from textbooks) However many people are convinced a paperless classroom is very possible. More and more teachers in this country are moving toward them and in Britain there is a heavy push to get paper out of the classrooms. Blogs promoting and supporting the idea are becoming more and more common.

I know many are excited about something like this. At the same time, I can feel the electronic groans and wails of despair from those of you who still think the computer was invented specifically to ruin your life. Why, I hear you cry, go paperless at all?!?! There are a number of possible benefits that could make it all very worthwhile:

• no more textbooks - this is a major paradigm shift for education, one that is almost unthinkable for some, but going paperless could make it possible to get rid of some or all textbooks. Before this is dismissed out of hand, lets think about it. Textbooks are a huge expense for schools. Students often abuse or destroy their books so it is an expense that is on going. It is obviously an expense that is nearly crippling for some schools because old textbooks are quite common. The lead time on any book is considerable so textbooks are also often filled with outdated material and information before you even get them. Textbooks often do not follow the specific standards of any particular state (another reason for national standards) so you must pick and choose and supplement. Textbooks lock you into a specific path, the path they have laid out in the book so you must either follow it or jump around to fit what you really want to do. Textbooks also are written by a small number of people. What they think is important stays in and what they think is unimportant stays out. Their personal or political beliefs can also taint the language, so you are working from a less than perfect product. Textbooks are huge, heavy cumbersome things. They create the majority of the clutter problems in desks, warp locker doors when students attempt to make them fit in, and create physical pain in kids from their sheer weight. Finally, show of hands - how many of you see beaming, interested faces when you utter "take out your textbooks, please"? None? I thought so. Lets face it - students almost without exception hate their textbooks and when you hate something, you tend to avoid it. Textbooks are plain and simple poor teaching tools.
• Less clutter - what makes up the largest chunk of clutter and mess in most classrooms? Paper - sticking out of desks, laying on tables, lost on the floor, filling waste baskets, and of course, those annoying little bits that fly all over when pages are ripped from spiral notebooks. Even the systems we use to attempt to control the clutter get cluttered. My file drawer scares me and of the student folders I have seen look like they have been run over by a car. In fact some look like they were on the track at a Nascar race....on a day it was raining. A paperless classroom would eliminate it all.
• Less confusion - yet another quiz - how many of you have faced a student who a) claims they never received an assignment, b) claims they turned an assignment in, c) says they can't find the assignment, or d) looks at you blankly and says "assignment?" ? Every hand in the room should be up. Students minds seem to be wired to either treat all paper as evil or to instinctively put it where they can't find it. A paperless classroom would eliminate this chaotic state of affairs.
• It is more convenient - imagine never having to argue with a student about whether their assignment was handed in or not. Imagine not having to copy off 30 of everything, every time you do anything. Imagine knowing exactly, to the second, when a student handed in an assignment. Imagine - and this is the biggie - never, ever having to deal with a giant stack of paper ever again. A paperless classroom, by it's nature, eliminates all of the inconvenient aspects of dealing with paper. All of the physical problems of dealing with paper from the mess to the storage would be gone. You would have more room because you would not have to store paper so shelves would be clear and file cabinets would be gone or much smaller. Students desks and locker would be cleaner and they could actually find things without exhaustive searches so time would be saved. Time would be saved grading because there would be no more shuffling piles of papers. Finding a paper would not require thumbing through a pile on sheet at a time or going through an over stuffed and unorganized file drawer. There would be less chances for errors because there would be no lost papers. The list goes on and on and on. The time and space saved more than makes up for any initial confusion in going paperless.
• It is more secure - the most common objection I have run into when talking about this issue is the fear that the computer will crash and all of the work would be gone. At one point in time, this might have been valid. Years ago when computers were less reliable and storage was non-existent or horribly difficult, I could see this point. Today, it is the reddest of red herrings. If used correctly, it is exceedingly difficult to do anything that would cause a modern computer to crash or delete anything. Computer have become so user friendly that before any deletion or drastic change, a user is given at least 2 chances to stop. If we take for granted we can all read at a 4th grade level, the chance of actually accidentally eliminating things is very, very low. But lets say the mythical boogie monster of computer use - the computer failure or crash - occurs. Everything is gone, right? Well, no, not necessarily. If you have a server with community storage, your files would still be safe. but lets go a step further and say the server goes down. No, even better, the state server and Edutech goes down. No, no, wait - the entire world system goes down...pant...pant!! (sorry for the melodrama but I actually get that type of response from a real computer-phobic at times) To even such dire scenarios I have two simple words - flash drive. Storing computer files is no longer difficult. In fact, storing massive amounts of information can be easier than properly filing several pieces of paper. Simply plug in the flash drive, scroll over the files to be saved, drag them to the flash drive, and drop them. That's it. Once they are there they are also far easier to manipulate and use than in a traditional file cabinet. You can sort the entire folder in several different ways with 2 clicks and find something is as simple as scrolling down and clicking. No more hours of thumbing through file cabinets. You could easily store all of your files from years of teaching on 2 or 3 different flash drives - several copies stored at different places so there will always be at least one no matter what your files will always be safe - in a manner of minutes. If the school burns down, takes water damage, gets vandalized all of those paper files could be gone and they can never be replaced or re-created. A paperless classroom is far more secure than a traditional classroom.

Many may not be ready for it yet, but paperless classrooms are coming and I look forward to their arrival.

No Child Left Behind's dirty little secrets

I am not a fan of No Child Left Behind

I know....you're shocked.

Ill-conceived, poorly timed, misdirected, unfocused, unrealistic.... The list could go on and on. NCLB is in the minds of a growing list of people and organizations little more than 670 pages of disaster pretending to the serious reform. Of course, what is to be expected from a bill which changed public education to it's core that had as one of it's key authors and creators a person who has no actual experience or background in education? Margaret Spellings, Secretary of Education under George Bush part 2, was given the power to apply all of her vast knowledge of education - which is to say pretty much none what so ever - to create and enforce sweeping change to the American educational world and the results have been rather predictable. Debated to a degree, but predictable. Spellings then spent most of her time as a public servant defending her legislative child with mixed results. NCLB has no shortage of critics. Teachers unions are strongly against it. Despite it being the brainchild of their leader, conservatives and Republicans down right hate it, and parents don't know what to make of it.

It's list of problems is relatively long and significant.

• It has a heavy dependence on high stakes testing. It creators and backers claim higher test scores somehow equate to higher achievement but they rarely if ever explain how or why this is so. We are apparently supposed to take it on faith because Margaret Spellings says it's true.
• It is unrealistic. Who, after all, actually believe ALL students will somehow be miraculously made proficient by 2014?
• It is a bill that is strong on flowery title (after all who actually wants to leave a child behind?) and weak on nearly everything else. For example it provides little in the way of actual suggestions on how schools should raise their scores. It simply demands it happen.
• It is a bill aimed at the problems that are rampant in urban schools with high minority populations and that are much less prevalent in other parts of the country and yet it has been applied with a broad and rather sloppy brush to the entire country.
• It has made teaching to the test more important that actual academic achievement

Still, according to testing results many schools appear to be making at least some progress - why complain? Because those results are deceiving in several important ways

• People are making strong connections between NCLB and drop out rates, especially among minority students. Struggling students see no reason to continue, their lower scores are removed from the overall numbers, so.......yes, test scores go up. Achievement? I don't think so.
• Proficiency rates for minorities - the ones Margaret Spelling says are the focus of the bill - remain low and the gap between minorities and white remains high.
• It imposes stakes so high - lost jobs and accreditation - that it encourages schools and teachers to cheat.

My feelings on this are obviously quite strong and I imagine there are many who can make a defense of NCLB that is as vigorous and strong as my critic. However, I think all would agree that NCLB at the least has been one of the hottest and most contentious topic in education in some time and I think a good look - and hopefully revision - of it is way overdue.

Twitter 2:the new voice of Freedom?

What a difference a week makes.
Just days ago, I deliberated about the usefulness, or lack of usefulness, of technology's newest gift (or curse, depending on how you look at it) to the world - twitter. While the useless aspects of Twitter seemed pretty plain, it also seemed as I looked into it that there was a growing number of people out there who were seeing it as more than simply a way to let people know you had lunch or what your favorite color is. In other words, amidst the mountains of complete airless nothingness, there seemed to be an hint that something good could come out of this seemingly unnecessary and time wasting technology. There are some out there pounding the Twitter drum with limited effect, so it seemed Twitter needed some ground shaking event that it could be applied too in order to make it's potential known.

Enter Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Up until this time, the Iranian president had wowed the world mostly with his denial of the holocaust and his desire to burn Israel to the ground. Throw in the semi-lucid ravings of a megalomaniac and threats with his active pursuit of nuclear weapons and you basically have what the entire world has always feared - a mad man with the bomb. Ahmadinejad apparently has the same effect on much of the Iranian population that he does on the rest of the world, because voters turned out in droves against him. Some say he has had to rig the election to stay in power and this has led to huge protests. This has led to a government crackdown, violence against protesters, and an attempt to cut off all information flowing to the outside world.

Enter Twitter - the new voice of world freedom, 140 characters at a time.

It seems that with the flow of official news and information stopped in and out of the country, protesters have turned to Twitter to both keep up on what is happening and to spread their message and the news to the rest of the world. This has become an international effort. The Iranian government became more aggressive in shutting down the official Twitter site and news agencies, so people improvised. Twitter has quickly become a major source of information for a situation that potentially has global ramifications.

What is the connection to education? I think it shows that even though we may be hesitant or even fearful of technology and change, we must remain open, even to things that at first glance may seem useless. Why? Because as I have said before, the new generation of students seem take in and process information differently. They are not tied to traditional methods or views and because they have lived their entire lives with these technologies see them as the tools of life. We attempt to see the usefulness of these things - they assume they are all useful and then proceed as if that is true. They have a tendency to rather naturally incorporate these things, finding uses we would have never seen or thought of.

Does all of this prove Twitter is an incredible new useful tool? No, at least not entirely, but again, it should make us realize there may be constructive uses for technology that are not apparent at first glance. The whole situation confirms in my mind that while we must never simply jump at anything or everything that comes along simply because it's new, we must remain open to the possibilities of everything and be willing to pull back and let students show us the way.

To Twitter or Not to Twitter

"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless information"
Bertrand Russell, British Author, mathematician, and philosopher
(1872-1970)

At least I know know why the Twits (isn't that what you call one who Twitters?) all appear so giddy about their new favorite past time. As a pure hearted lover of technology I initially welcomed the arrival of Twitter. It swirled in just after blogging and wikis swept us off of our feet (digitally anyway) and I saw it as a new avenue for the creatively concise. My thoughts turned to another young writer whose editor challenged him to write a book with just 400 words. The young man was a talented, ambitious type and did the editor one better by using only 223, and wound up writing one of the greatest children's books in the history of literature. Sad to say, the Twitter invasion has not inspired anything even vaguely similar. Instead it has produced a tidal wave of largely useless information. Thousands of people sit on edge waiting to see what someone else had for lunch or whether a new pair of pants will fit. Take "inane", move 10 paces toward "completely useless", and you are still well short of the airless, mindless nature of the majority of the content of Twitter. What makes it worse is that this haven of vacuous uselessness is being actively used by only a small percentage of folks who even bother to sign up for it. So even I admit it's useless, right? It has no place in the classroom.....

....except......

....there appears to be a growing number of credible educational professional - sane, grown adults, mind you - you are promoting the educational uses of Twitter and as completely and totally as I have been against it, I have to admit as I read what they say, much of it makes sense. Many have taken up the defense of Twitter in the classroom and many are not academic lightweights or children. David Parry is one such person. He is an assistant professor of emerging media and communication at the University of Texas at Dallas and is the creator of a blog called AcademHack. It is dedicated to the appropriate uses of technology in the academic world and he has posted a rousing and very convincing argument for the use of Twitter in the classroom. I began the post looking for reasons to trash it and found myself agreeing with point after point.

I think my eyes have been opened about Twitter. Not a lot - I still think in most cases it is a useless technology and little more than a waste of time. However, I have learned enough to know that before I really pass judgment I must know more. I have spent some time trying to find sites that could give me more information such as a short, easy to understand description of what Twitter is and basic tutorials on how to use it. As I searched, I kept finding people in education who were finding really good and logical uses for Twitter in high schools, libraries, and for college students.

Long story short? After being convinced for all of this time that I had absolutely no use for Twitter, I find myself leaning a bit the other way. I think it is an example of what is going on today. The vast amount of almost daily change is almost overpowering. Our world is changing which means our students are changing and we must change with them. However, we must always retain the sense to understand that not all change is good and the flexibility to change when it is beneficial or needed. Part of both of these is the need to have the patience to really look at new technologies carefully and the open mindedness to not make snap judgments. If we don't have or acquire these traits we will either jump on every technology bandwagon, good or bad, and waste valuable time and money, or pass on technology that will help us teach better and place students in the optimal learning atmosphere.