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| Philadelphia's Christ Church "Vinegar" Bible |
Face it. People seem to love paper.
Especially paper books — there is something about the feel, the smell, and the
tactile satisfaction of turning pages, that remains dear to many readers. In
fact, our ongoing romance with paper may have somewhat slowed the move towards
becoming “paperless.” Newsweek
magazine tried it by changing to a digital-only edition at the end of 2012,
yet, a print edition of Newsweek was
relaunched on March 7, 2014. And, even though millions of Kindle e-readers have been sold (Forbes estimates roughly 43.7
million Kindle devices had been
cumulatively sold through the end of 2013),
GeekWire reports that sales of paper
books are on the rebound, with sales increasing in 2014 by 2.4%.
An August, 2009, a New York Times article speculated that in 5 years, more students
would be learning from digital texts and online resources in place of paper
textbooks. At that time, teachers and
district leaders in Arizona’s Vail Unified School district began the Beyond Textbooks initiative (http://beyondtextbooks.org),
an online resource that has since grown to more than 100 partners in Arizona,
California, Idaho, and Wyoming, with more than 12,000 teachers sharing their
best lesson plans and online learning resources. The success of the Beyond
Textbooks program was recognized at the ISTE 2014 conference in Atlanta,
Georgia, when it received the “Digital Content and Curriculum AchievementAward.”
How might the Beyond Textbook model
help other schools? The good news is that the digital divide seems to be
narrowing as more students are connecting online using a variety of either
personally- or school-owned digital devices. When coupled with the abundance of
free or inexpensive cloud-based services, such as Google Apps for Education, or
Microsoft One Drive, the age of being able to teach and learn in a truly
paperless environment may have arrived.
As schools contemplate the idea of
“going paperless,” education leaders must be thoughtful about whether adequate
systems are in place that will help guarantee a successful transition. In
addition to making sure the infrastructure will provide adequate bandwidth to
support connectivity, are the staff and students ready to adopt a new way of
thinking about “how we do our work?” For administrators, it’s important to
model and promote a paperless workflow by making use of online surveys and
forms, meeting agendas, shared calendars and collaborative note-taking.
For teachers, going paperless needs to
be thought of as more than posting digitally-captured worksheets online.
Learning tasks will need to be redesigned so that students are provided
opportunities to create, collaborate and communicate in ways that take
advantage of digital tools. Teachers may access a variety of free online
classroom management services such as Edmodo, Schoology, or Google Classroom,
in order to support instruction, collaboration, and the management of digital
products. A variety of cloud-based and "Web 2.0" services are available that provide students with the ability to
create online products or portfolios to demonstrate their
learning, thus making it easy to “turn in” links to their published digital
work.
Those of us who may have a habit of
printing out online articles or email messages, should make an effort to
embrace the idea of moving to cloud-based services such as Evernote
or Google Drive.
These services will not only store our documents, images, and media online, but
they also provide powerful search tools that help us find and access our
information from just about any device that can connect to the Internet. My
personal favorite tool is Evernote which allows me to clip web articles,
capture handwritten notes, snap photos, and record voice in my notes, plus
giving me the ability to share and collaborate with others, even those who are
not Evernote users.
Are you ready to take the plunge
and "be" paperless?
