OMG They've Cut the Paper Budget!

This lament is heard many times in many schools over the years in most schools everywhere.  Usually it starts around February when all those test-taking skills handouts are starting to get "run off" in preparation for the state tests.  This year, it is happening much earlier with the horrendous budget crunch. In today's Greenville News, there is a story about schools not being able to  make copies in order to save money. Teachers are upset that their students won't have their own handouts.  Yet, there IS  away to end this perpetual problem.  We know there are way too many worksheets anyway. (Some elementary schools have been known to go through thousands of pieces of paper in one week when collected for student data studies I worked on!)  As Marcia Tate says, worksheets don't grow dendrites.

In fact, there is a solution that would eliminate worries about the "paper" budget.  Let's go paperless!  Well, at least as much as possible.  This budget crunch may be the push needed to begin thinking about ways that digital technology could be used in creative and resourceful ways.  Since change is both push and pull, a huge advantage would be contributing to saving the environment by using less paper.  But the biggest advantage of all would be for students--as it should be.  In Will Richardson's blog post "Get.Off.Paper",  he asks

"Does anyone think most of the kids in our classes are going to be printing a bunch of paper in their grown up worlds? If you do, fine; keep servicing the Xerox machine. But if you don’t, which I hope is most of you, are you doing as much as you can to get off paper?"

Grand vision but what does it look like?  As with many transformational changes,  it is easy to say and hard to do.  Alec Couros posted this great video on his blog, Open Thinking & Digital Pedagogy to offer a glimpse of what networked learning can look like--minimum use of paper needed.  It is a high school example but I bet we could come up with corollaries for elementary and middle school. 

 

It will take bold steps to make this scenario happen--and a major cognitive shift in thinking about learning and teaching among policy makers, teachers, administrators, and parents.  The students--not so much. They are already there.