Teaching Paperless

I was going to post about teaching paper-less, which is pretty much what I do. I gave 2 physical paper handouts to my class last year, but I’m much happier using OneNote, Evernote, and a range of other tools to teach and assess my students.

It’s not as big a deal as you might think. I’m lucky enough to be teaching in a 1-1 notebook school with an excellent wireless network and a built in data projector with good audio in my room. It’s a great combination. I use OneNote as my ‘blackboard’ projected on the screen, and students can send me work, or plug their own laptop in, when they’re presenting. I take notes in OneNote of our discussions just as I used to write sumaries of the discussion on the whiteboard, and before that (yes, I’m that old) the blackboard! Students keep their own notes too and sometimes I’ll send them a OneNote page as an attachment for them to add to their own Literature notebook. I’ll email them pre-reading and I’ll email them homework as well as putting it on our class blog for reference. I use several wikis to allow collaboration, between my students, and also with the other Year 12 Literature class in the school. The data projector is pretty much always on; showing films, or notes, or presentations students have made. I keep my notes on each student’s progress in OneNote, write my reports in Markbook and keep a record of their SAC scores in Excel. I use our learning management system (eduKate) only to post final SAC scores so that students can access them in private and in their own space before getting the work back in class.

As I said, I was going to post about this in a lot of detail, but the latest post from Teaching Paperless talks in good detail about some of the tools that are useful here.  I do like Dropbox. It gives you 2GB of free data storage online, which you can then access from any computer in the world, or your iphone. I haven’t used it with students yet (you can set up shared folders but they’d need a login) but I can happily leave my notebook computer at school if I want, dump my correction into Dropbox, and access it from home on the desktop that night (Mac or PC) Say I wanted to ride my bike home from school, and didn’t want to look like a bicycle messenger with my computer on my back? Well Dropbox could make that happen. You might say, ‘so would a USB key’ but Dropbox is cooler!  There’s a ridiculously simplified video below explaining what it does.

And, finally, I don’t try to teach paperless to save the world. So much paper waste goes on every Saturday morning when the AGE hits the doorsteps, and I’ve just received a brand new printed phone book that I didn’t order, and don’t want, that I would never sacrifice my students’ learning to save paper. No, I think it’s more efficient, quicker, allows colour and movement and does what I want to do, more effectively and helps my students plan for their tertiary learning.

Here’s the baby version of what Dropbox does:

 

To Web, or not to Web; that is the question!

It can seem madness. You JUST think you have the hang of Powerpoints, and embedding video and using blogs and someone shows you Prezi. And starts talking about Web2 applications that you didn’t even DREAM existed … And don’t even start me on the hardware that makes delivering and accessing information something that can keep you going – quite literally – 24/7/365.

It can seem like there’s a chaotic deluge – a downpour; a flood! – that threatens to sweep you away, and with it, everything you thought you ever knew and believed in about the teaching of English. Which is (he says, answering the unasked question implicitly posed by his own unasked rhetorical assertion) that what is critical is the relationship between student/s and teacher; and what underpins that is effective communication. So – surely – it’s more about the face2face and the chalkface than all this technological hysteria?

Well, yes – of course – it is. And isn’t. Teaching – my teaching – has changed. I no longer leave school with a pile of marking at the end of the day – or weekend – and know that’s it. I know that every night, my students will check out the Wiki, or blog; every night a couple will email work, often quite late – and ask a question that, without an immediate response, would have stymied them. Teaching is more constant, and if the protest that springs to lips is that that makes it more demanding, and if it’s flippant to note that that is the way of the world, it is no less true to note that my teaching feels more rewarding, as more students are engaged – CAN be engaged – in more ways, in more depth, and just as personally (because the chalkface is still there!)

So communication IS the key, but I don’t have to depend on a single lesson every two or three days to hit and hope that I’m impressive enough and they are receptive enough for it to stick. I don’t have to try to be all things in one lesson: a teacher for kinetic, aural and visual learners, because I can provide some of that breadth of stimulus online. And I am finding that as much as the Net makes for a great delivery platform, it also provides great variety in HOW that content CAN be offered.

The skill that teachers need to work on now is to plan a spectrum of systems and strategies that fit their teaching styles, their material and their students. A hit-and-miss hot-pot will be no more successful using IT than it woudl have been if you bustled into class one day with an armful of coloured papers and scissors; the next with spelling books followed by grammar exercises … And the key – as ever was! – is time, and making the best use of that which you have!