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:
We have been rolling out our 1:1 laptops this week; three more year groups to go over the next few weeks and then we’ll be right across 7-12. We use a Sharepoint platform as our portal, so I created a template that builds various components into our virtual classrooms – one such component being OneNote folder for each student in each class. Time consuming for each teacher to set the appropriate permissions but worthwhile. It means that teacher and student can access the shared OneNote at any time for notes, marking of student work, uploading of files etc. Teachers drop documents into a shared area, and students use the Send to OneNote feature to upload to their own OneNote sections. This process much easier in OneNote 2010.
And have you come across Microsoft Interactive Classroom – free add ins for PowerPoint and OneNote. Teacher’s ppt auto sent to student’s OneNote section, with annotations ….. all live. Fantastic, not fully tested across the entire school yet but works great with the sample groups I’ve tried. Inbuilt survey capability too.