Letting Go of Paper

aka Living Like There is No Tomorrow and Throwing Everything Away

Now that the 2009-2010 school is behind me, I have started to think and plan for next year.  For starters, I’ll be in a new room, actually a computer lab.  This is very exciting and a great opportunity to fully integrate technology into my teaching.  Regardless, the new location means I have to move out of the room I’d been working from for 5 years.  So, over the last week I took a stroll down memory lane as I went through cabinets and drawers overflowing with folders of work samples, outdated textbooks, various instructional books and resources (most of which I have never opened), and an endless collection of photocopied papers, assignments, rubrics, reading packets, enrichment activities, instructional strategies, test data, and so much more. 

Initially, my cleaning and packing involved separating everything into piles: garbage, “could be useful/might use some day”, useful, and very important stuff.  After a day of this method, I realized I have a lot of stuff to move.  So, I adjusted my approach, anything that did not make it in the “very important” pile was label trash/recycle.  Now, of course there were a few expectations to this rule, I kept many reading packets of various short stories (I do teach Language Arts after all) and a few random samples of student work.  Everything else, was sent to the trash or recycler (close to three car loads).  

The process was very freeing and allowed me to streamline my approach toward teaching and the utilization of my resources.  As I was cleaning, I found that over the years I’d tucked away many things with the idea that they might be helpful (if I ever taught that particular concept).  After close to 10 years of teaching, this collection of resources has became a lot of unused junk. I think when I started as a new teacher I was so eager to get whatever resources I could get my hands on.  My thinking was, the more “stuff” I acquired the easier teaching would become. Right?  Well, now a lot of those unused papers and posters have become outdated clutter.  

So, with my push for more meaningful inclusion of technology in my teaching, I figure the best place to start is with my own collection of resources.  If something is worth keeping, I should have a digital copy of it.  So, before throwing anything away, I made sure to scan a number of documents I either needed or thought would be helpful in the near future. 

I am not pushing for a paperless classroom.  I still have a fond spot for notebooks and work collected in portfolios or folders, as a way to track and showcase a student’s progress.  Also, I still have stacks of novels and such to lug over to my new room.  However, I feel in order to maximize the full potential of my resources, and to access them in an efficient manner, the filing cabinet needs to be abandoned and forgotten.  

As the world continues to shift toward a more digital dominant society, our classroom habits must keep up.  We no longer write letters, we send emails.  When on vocation, we do not send postcards, we send text messages.  We do not pay our “paperless” bills with checks, we pay them online.  We do not write down driving directions, we use our GPS units.  When was the last time you wrote someones phone number down in a phone book or wrote out a recipe?  As a society we are moving away from paper and have started storing all of these items on our digital devices.  I need to do the same with this my teaching resources.  It just makes everything easier.  When I have digital copies of everything, I can easily email parents, students, and other teachers whatever they might require.  I can post and share my ideas on blogs and our classroom wiki with ease.  Additionally, by maintaining a digital collection of my resources, I can access them anywhere.  I can teach from any location. I can easily update, modify, and improve any assignments very quickly.  I know, you get the idea.  All of these points are painfully obvious.  

Ultimately, my point is that by limiting the amount of things we hoard away in filing cabinets, folders, and binders the more efficiently we can access and take advantage of the resources we have collected over the years.  We must continually evaluate the thing we hang on to and implement a way to easily access this material.  So, one of my goals for the 2010-2011 year will be to hold on to a lot less and digitally store that which I choose to keep.  

Questions (and/or struggles) for the future: 1. How to deliver information and assignments to students and parents without using countless pieces of paper.  2. How to organize and manage my digital files so I do not clutter up my desktop.