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:

 

OneNote to rule them all!

I keep banging on about organisational tools like Evernote and OneNote and OneNote increased its possible usability a bit this week with the release of an Iphone app. It’s not available in Australia yet I notice, but having mobile access to your OneNote notebooks (will it be all I wonder or just some?) is undeniably a good thing. With students more and more holding a powerful computer in their hand (or pocket) in the form of a smart phone, future tools are going to be mobile tools.

Above: screenshot of the OneNote app, and news aboutit from Mashable HERE

 

Evernote it!

I’ve started thinking about how I’m going to organise my teaching this year, and more importantly, how I’m going to ask the students to organise their learning, considering the swag of options available in the 1-1 classroom.

I’ve talked about OneNote before. It’s part of the Microsoft suite, and has been my mainstay teaching and organising tool for the last couple of years, replacing the bazilliions of separate Word documents as well as replacing PowerPoint for me, all at the same time. I set up a Notebook for my Literature teaching and have sections for each section of the course, and a page for each lesson in the year. All organised!

And I still like it, but Evernote is a pretty powerful FREE substitute that’s improving all the time and available in all platforms, including apple mac. I

Below is what it looks like on my Mac at home. You can have as many separate notebooks as you like each notebook contains notes that may be text, images or both. Stacks are new and they are like folders with notebooks inside them. The new stacks make it much more flexible for a learning tool. Consider a STACK for Literature, with a separate notebook for each core text or section of the course? You got it. All completely searchable (including images) as well as available from any computer anywhere and on your iphone as well.

I’ve heard reservations about putting all  your stuf in the ‘cloud’ but Evernote has a desktop app that works offline and keeps your data on your own machine, which it syncs with the web.

Below is how it looks when you open up the Iphone app.(from UK blog ZATH, who give it a pretty good review too.)

So, you have your notes on your laptop, your ipad, your desktop and your iphone. Pretty powerful possibilities!

 

 

OneNote

Whenever I think about moving back across to the MAC platform, and that’s often, I think of OneNote, pretty much the only application I’d really miss. Here’s a really, really, brief intro how OneNote looks: