Over 900 Teachers Have Pledged to Go Paperless for Earth Day 2010

A good couple days. We're at the end of the quarter and it's springtime!

So, I'm taking a break from JingCrits for a Paperless Earth Day update. As of 3PM EST, there were 906 teachers worldwide who had taken the pledge to go paperless on Earth Day 2010!

The whole list is available online to view; everything is listed alphabetically by school -- so see how many folks from your school are taking part!

You can make your own pledge to teach paperless on Earth Day by clicking here and filling out the short form.

In addition, TeachPaperless has just started working with the Earth Day 2010 Action Center and, in an upcoming post, I'll have more information about what's going on there. Until then, join the Earth Day community of over 750,000 members and add TeachPaperless to your network!

Over 800 Teachers Pledge to Go Paperless for Earth Day!

Over 800 teachers from around the world have now signed our pledge to go paperless in their classrooms for Earth Day 2010. Can you commit to going paperless for a day?

Click here to add your name and pledge!

And click here to see everybody who's pledged so far!

Update on the Paperless Earth Day Campaign

Over 700 teachers have signed the pledge to go paperless for Earth Day!

Thank you to so many of the subscribers to this blog as well as all the great educators on Twitter for helping out and spreading the word.

Let's keep this ball rolling! Earth Day is April 22.

Pledge now!

Go Paperless

Steve Katz posted a nice summary of where this Paperless Earth Day idea came from on his blog.

Check it out; tell Steve "THANKS!" for instigating this whole thing; and then be sure to join over 650 teachers from around the world in pledging to go paperless for the 40th Earth Day this April 22, 2010.

Nearly 600 Teachers Have Taken the Paperless Earth Day Pledge

Click here to see the current list (organized alphabetically by school name).

And click here to pledge.

500 Teachers Pledge to Go Paperless for Earth Day 2010!

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, over 500 teachers worldwide have pledged to go paperless in their classrooms for the day.

Here's a link to the original call.

Here's the place to pledge.

Here's a spreadsheet of teachers who have pledged.

And here's a handful of posts written by folks taking the paperless challenge:

EdTech Workshop
Web 2.0 for ESL
Just One Teacher
Musings 365
SMS Tigertalk
Getting Comfortable Teaching with Technology
Earthcast 2010

Thanks for all your words and actions.

A Student Challenge to Go Paperless for Earth Day

Woke up to a pleasant surprise.


Turns out that the Green Team at South Middle School has challenged their entire student body to go paperless for Earth Day!


Would love to hear about other schools taking on the pledge school-wide. As of right now, over 430 teachers from around the world have taken the pledge to go paperless on April 22, 2010, the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. 

You can pledge by clicking here!

Update on Teachers Pledging to Go Paperless for Earth Day

From Vietnam to British Columbia. From Serbia to Honduras. Teachers are pledging to go paperless for Earth Day 2010!

At last count, we had about 360 teachers from around the world pledged.

Here is the original call from a week ago. Here is the form through which you can pledge to go paperless. And here is the Doc listing all of the teachers who have pledged.

Thank you to all of the teachers involved so far. Steve and I are thinking of ways that we can all share what we do in our classes on April 22. It would be great to have a site that could serve as documentation of the event worldwide. If you would like to get involved in helping to create that sort of thing, let me know.

Teachers Going Paperless for Earth Day

Just an update.

At last count (3:45PM EST), there were 275 teachers from around the world who had pledged to go paperless on Earth Day (April 22). The response to this call is something far greater than anything Steve and I had expected. A big thank you to everyone who has helped out over the last few days with the campaign on FB, Twitter, and in your schools!

Click here to see the pledges so far.

And click here to pledge.

What I'm Planning for Paperless Earth Day

A couple folks have asked what I'm planning to do for Paperless Earth Day. Here's the plan.

Our school sits on a pretty big plot of land. Rolling hills, two ponds, trees. Perfect locale for teaching environmental science, actually. Anyhow, both my West Civ and Latin classes have learned about ancient attitudes concerning nature: from the Homeric fury of the sea to the pastoral visions of Horace and from civilizations' first agriculturalists learning to tame the un-tame-able to Egyptians demanding of their Pharaoh the annual flood of the Nile, the history of civilization is the history of humankind's relationship with nature.

And so, we are planning to take a nature walk. And in preparation for our walk, each of our classes will be designing a 'Nature in History' wiki-scrapbook. The plan is to go out there into the great wilderness that is our campus and find bits of nature on our own grounds that lend themselves to telling the story of humankind's 'Nature Story'. Looking for metaphors in the dirt, as it were.

We'll be taking digital photos of what we find and publishing our findings, thinkings, and conversation on our wikis. It's up to the kids then to do with them what they want; the day's findings might form the basis of future projects, or you might see some of the elements of our investigation on the students' West Civ Proj blog.

Looking forward to hearing what all of you are planning for Paperless Earth Day. Hi-tech or Lo-tech, all ideas are welcome on Steve Katz's Paperless PD wiki. Let us know what's up in your neck of the woods.

Over 100 Teachers Pledge to Go Paperless for Earth Day

You folks are amazing!

We now have over 100 teachers who have taken the pledge to go Paperless for Earth Day (April 22)!

Read the original explanation of what we're doing and why we're doing it, then surf over to our Google Doc and pledge to go paperless!

Thanks!

Paperless Classroom Earth Day Pledge 2010

As of last check, over 50 teachers had signed the pledge to go paperless for Earth Day!

Here's a link to the post explaining what we're doing and here's a link to the pledge itself.

Note that we're organizing the list in alphabetical order by school. That gives us the chance to easily see which schools have the highest participation!

Thanks to everybody who's signed up so far. And please continue to spread the word in your schools and on Twitter.

Go Paperless for Earth Day!

Steve Katz has started a Paperless section on his PD wiki and is looking for contributors. Go help him out; that could be a great resource.

He's also calling for folks to go paperless for Earth Day.

I can dig that.

The Clean Air Council produces my favorite image demonstrating what American paper waste looks like: "Each year, Americans trash enough office paper to build a 12-foot wall from Los Angeles to New York City."

Furthermore, paper production is a problem twice over: because excess carbon dioxide is released during the initial harvesting of the trees, and methane is released once paper winds up in the landfill.

Now there are those cynics who will say that the energy consumption and toxicity produced by discarded computers and consumer electronics is just as bad as paper waste. And while currently, paper waste dwarfs the waste produced by electronics, certainly they have a point that we're dealing with bad situations on both ends.

And so the solution can not merely be recycling. The solution -- on both fronts -- has to by source reduction.

And, as the EPA notes: "source reduction is waste prevention".

According to that agency:

 Recycling one ton of paper would

• Save enough energy to power the average American home for six months.
• Save 7,000 gallons of water.
• Save 3.3 cubic yards of landfill space.
• Reduce greenhouse gas emissions by one metric ton of carbon equivalent (MTCE).

But not using the paper to begin with would do so much more.

Schools are notorious hotbeds for paper waste. I've seen estimates of 40% of school waste being paper. The Clean Air Council states that each American blows through an average of 650 pounds of paper a year. I'm sure teachers bear a higher average.

As for the electronics waste side of the argument, we consumers should be insisting that manufacturers build 'shell-based' modular computers and mobiles that allow for the easy swap out of old individual components for new while being extra-durable and maintaining the life of the device itself for far longer than anything currently on the market. And we should be demanding (with our pocketbooks) that the companies themselves assist in electronics recycling programs that actually recycle the material components like lead and mercury in safe ways and refrain from shipping junked machines to third-world countries to poison the children of the poor who scavenge them for metals.

As for what we can do in our classrooms, Steve and I are asking that as teachers you pledge to refrain from using any paper or accepting any work on paper this Earth Day (April 22nd). And as for old machines: use Freecycle, support non-profit recycling programs like the National Cristina Foundation, and let's make a difference.

I've started a Google Doc where you can sign your name and pledge to commit to go paperless on April 22.

And remember: Source reduction is the best form of conservation. So think about what you print, what you buy, and how you recycle. Teachers and students together can make a difference.

TeachPaperless on Facebook

Join the TeachPaperless Group on Facebook for further discussion of all things 21C education!

It's an easy way for folks interested in paperless culture -- and who are already on FB -- to connect.

Friday Chat: Paperless Student Publications and Media

Happy Paperless Friday!

Today at 10:15AM EST, we'll be discussing paperless student publications and media over at the Friday Chat.

Paperless student newspapers, digital radio podcasts, and live-streamed student broadcasts are the subject of the day. See you there!

Paperless Social Studies

At this week's weekly social tech in ed session at Hopkins, we're going to be taking a look at running a paperless social studies class.

I'm kind of excited because, come second semester at my high school, I'll be teaching World History to two sections of 9th graders. This'll be my first time formally teaching social studies, though I teach history extensively in my Latin classes and of course in Art History.

So I've been thinking about great social studies related sites online.

The Library of Congress's TPS, the CIA Factbook, and the BBC's extensive history section all came to mind. On the homefront, Studs Terkel's Conversations with America is a personal favorite; and for the music-loving social studies teachers among us, the Smithsonian Folkways' site is chock full of music from around the world.

I'd love to hear some of your favorites. And I'm not looking for just good clips of video; I'm looking for sites that offer different ways of looking at history and world cultures.

Paperless Labyrinth

Andrew B. Watt spent part of yesterday's 'Paperless Friday' hanging out in the shadow of an ancient rock calendar.

Read his reflections and consider just what a fantastic lesson this was.

Thoughts About Paperless Math

Got some great ideas regarding paperless math resources. Check out the comments to yesterday's post (I'll get around to organizing them eventually... my goal is to make a description of each of the resources and apps I've learned about this summer available in the blog sidebar soon!)

One reader, however, did bring up a point which I feel should get broader attention (especially by new readers of this blog):

I'm currently at the point of saying that using technology for everyday use in math is using technology incorrectly. Please use it as a tool when it is the best tool. Don't use it just to "go green" or to "do more technology stuff." There are so many other things you can do if going green is your point. As much as I love technology in the classroom, it isn't ALWAYS the answer. - Brian Zollinhofer

Yup. I agree.

In fact, I posted related to this issue a few months' back and should haul the posts out of the archives for re-evaluation now.

First was the 'Why Do I Hate Paper' post from back in February. Here's a snippet (you can read the whole thing here):

I was asked recently why I am so against using paper in the classroom.

I'm not.

I'm into letting kids make paper airplanes. And construct buildings and mazes out of paper. And shoot hoops at the trashcan with paperballs. I'm into letting them draw on big pieces of paper with charcoal and having them get their hands dirty. I'm into dog-eared paperbacks creeping out of their pockets and I'm into letters and personal notes and thank-yous and miss-yous and get-wells scribbled on scrap-paper.

It's not paper I'm against.

I'm against the static idea of knowledge that paper so often represents.

The second was a response to a post on the Digital Ed blog at Ed Week back in March:

If you feel like you have to 'fit tech in' to your classroom practice, then you're quickly going to find yourself frustrated. You might as well be forced to 'fit in' a discussion about orange juice. Or sea lions. Or the Knights Templar. Or be forced to wear mittens while you erase from the chalkboard.

I think the worst thing we can do is to try to 'fit tech in' to our teaching. Rather, if we integrate tech into our lessons it is because tech is integrated into our lives and the process is natural -- obvious, even.

Paperless Math?

I'm on a mission for a reader who's a math teacher.

What options are out there for collecting math homework/assignments paperlessly? With the exception of what you can do with a Tablet, I'm woefully ignorant about how to handle math work (especially in high school).

Let's put this readership and PLN to work and come up with a list of options!

From the Archives: I Was a Paper Junkie

Originally posted April 30, 2009


I was a paper junkie.

My first year teaching, I was so scared of speeding through a lesson and not having something for the students to do that I used to run off several copies of "fun" assignments each day (crosswords, games, whatever I could scrounge up each morning from the old file cabinet in the closet I'd inherited as an office). This inevitably added up to two or three sheets of paper per student per day. And this would be stuff I'd never even see again once I'd handed it out. I'm not even counting the handouts I'd work up for the day's lesson.

But, I was a paper junkie.

That first year teaching, we had a copy limit of somewhere between 10 and 15 thousand copies per teacher. I think I maxed out in January.

Like I said: I was a paper junkie.

I used to pride myself on the physical weight of my mid-term and final exams. Students in my Latin classes used to complain about their hands cramping up and I'd boast about the 22 page final exam I'd written in Greek History class back in college.

I was unrepentant.

When I came to my present school, I found three copy machines whereas my previous school only had two for almost twice as large a faculty. I was in heaven.

I once made a copy of a seventeen page annotated version of T.S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland' for each student in all five sections of the American Lit class I was teaching at the time. (I hope the statute of limitations is over for that one...).

But I think the most egregious use of paper came when I used to run off fresh copies of everyone's poems in Poetry Club so that we could all mark 'em up during workshops. I easily made a half-dozen copies of each poem per each one student in that club. In other words, each student would wind up with six copies of the exact same poem. And we used to read lots of poems.

But I was a paper junkie.

I used to print out copies of ebooks. (I remember that at that first school, I'd been given a curriculum guide on CD and I actually decided to print the whole thing).

I used to print out my grades in triplicate.

I used to forget to fill the toner cartridge in my desktop printer and have to go back and reprint dozens of copies of a twelve-page test.

I even got a special card from the office supply store to make copies in bulk.

And then I woke up.

I think it was the year our school moved to 1:1 computing. No one in administration suggested not using paper (in fact, I don't think any of them had even heard the term 'blog' at that point). None one on the facilities staff said anything (and they were the guys who hauled in those ton-sized pallets stacked with reams). I think it was really just a matter of me sitting down and playing around with this new laptop and before long realizing that I'd written hundreds of pages worth of notes and ideas and meeting minutes and lesson plans and hadn't printed a single piece of paper.

And why hadn't I printed anything from my new laptop?

Because I couldn't figure out how to.

That's how this whole foray into paperlessness began. It wasn't that I was some tech wizard. I certainly wasn't all that environmentally conscious. I barely used the Internet with the exception of reading bulletin boards and getting my morning news.

Rather, the reason I got into paperlessness was because I was too dumb to figure out how to hook a printer up to my new laptop and too stubborn to ask the IT department to do it for me.

I totally slacked my way into paperlessness.

It was only once I was there that I realized what had happened. And then the epiphany came: "Hey buddy," my mind said to me, "you don't really need paper to teach a class".

And so, I didn't go back. And over the last three years, I've been on a crazy journey where I've easily saved over 40,000 sheets of paper. And that doesn't even count the paper my kids have saved in my class. Whereas I used to like to brag that kids would burn through two notebooks over the course of my AP Latin class, now not a single notebook ever needs be opened.

Just for fun today, I cut-and-pasted the contents of a single student blog into Word. This was a blog that a student in my Latin II class has kept this year. So we're talking from September to April. When that blog popped up in 12pt font as a Word document, it turned out to be 107 pages long.

107 pages.

Written by a 15 year old.

In one class.

If nothing else, my experience with a paperless classroom has proven to me demonstrably that there is just so much waste that we take for granted in education. And it's an ongoing eyeopening experience for me to see just how much a change a little change can make.

The old me never understood that. But he was a paper junkie.