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.