What?! A paperless classroom? You’ve never heard of such a thing?! Well… guess what. It can be done. I teach 5 classes of 34 students in an urban public school. Do you know how many trees I was killing a year? Fine… thats not the “real” problem. Do you know how much time I was WASTING in the copy room a year? Now that! That was the real problem. So I made a decision. I’m going paperless. Here’s how I did it, and YOU can too!
First, create a website that is user friendly. I liked using wordpress.com for my website but my school offered Moodle and Google Classroom as options as well.
Second – check in with your students. Ask them to speak to you privately if they don’t have the resources to print from their homes and can’t afford to do it in the school or local library. You can print a few extra copies for them if necessary.
Third, stay active online. Give students weekly assignments and have them print them on Sunday night so they don’t have to go online every day. Your website can be used from year to year. You can hide resources once you are done and unhide them the next year to make edits.
Don’t be afraid to make a change in your teaching style, especially if it means you will save yourself VALUABLE TIME, that you know you could use doing other things like lesson planning and grading (oh wait? That can be done paperless too?) Check out my post here for how to turn your grading into a virtual world.
