Paperless

The Paperless School of the Future Is Here Now!

Computer networks and Internet resources are helping teachers cut down on paper use. Teachers can keep grades and attendance online and use texts that are available at no cost. How are these experiments going? Is the "paperless classroom" just around the corner? Included: Education World writer Ryan Francis's look at three classrooms that are trying to go paperless!

In a classroom in rural Kentucky, students can no longer use the excuse "My dog ate my homework." And that annoying churning of the pencil sharpener no longer interrupts the teacher's lesson. At Eminence Middle School -- the home of The Paperless Classroom --teacher Stephanie Sorrell has accomplished the seemingly impossible task of transforming her seventh- and eighth-grade classrooms into a paperless society! Her feat is an example of a movement toward paperless classes -- and, perhaps someday, paperless schools.

Sorrell's classes have served as guinea pigs. Those classes were tapped to introduce technology that could vastly improve student achievement, she said. Each of her students now has a personal digital assistant (PDA) that enables him or her to receive tests and homework via an infrared beam from Sorrell's PDA. Instead of standing in front of a copying machine for hours, she types tests and homework assignments into her computer at home and transfers them to the PDAs at school.

HELPING MIGRANT STUDENTS

In Henry County, Kentucky, a part of the country where agriculture still dominates, farmers use migrant workers to harvest their crops. That is the backdrop against which Sorrell searched high and low for money to help her Spanish-speaking students, mostly the children of migrant workers, learn the same material at the same pace as her English-speaking pupils were learning it. She found the Kentucky Migrant Technology Project, a division of the Ohio Valley Educational Cooperative (OVEC). OVEC provided Sorrell with 30 handheld PDAs, which...