Save a tree—practice a paperless classroom

Each school year, I choose a theme for my classroom. It’s usually a general or specific way in which I hope to make a positive change for my school year. One year I hung a large yellow smiley face in the back of my classroom and deemed the year “smile til it hurts.” Another year I decided to be “comfortably numb”—to not allow any bureaucratic educational red-tape paperwork bother me. This year, I began with a vow to eliminate paper usage in my classroom. Now for me, this is a pretty easy task. I teach in a classroom equipped with awesome computers and have a website that I post all lesson plans, assignments, announcements. My students also have access to a dropbox for handing in assignments electronically. And this is the year that I began to facilitate our high school’s first online class using Moodle which eliminates all need for paper. Every activity, assignment, quiz, and wiki is posted electronically and then graded complete with feedback through the site. So I’m good. But I’m also working on those around me. It really irritates me when a whole sheet of paper is used for something that could have been easily formatted on a half sheet thereby cutting down on paper usage by half, but also requiring that someone use a paper cutter. And I’m bugged by memos that come via email and then also on paper copy. Why? And teacher’s who copy mounds and mounds of handouts. Couldn’t at least some of these be distributed electronically? It just takes a little time and creativity. This paperless theme is one that will take me through the rest of my teaching days. It puts more responsibility on the students . . . good thing. It makes learning more fun and interactive for the students . . . good thing. It requires that students network both among themselves and with their teachers . . . good thing. It saves trees . . . awesome concept!