Robin Exley is not a digital native. He doesn't own a laptop computer and doesn't know how to send a text on his cellphone.
But the Citadel middle school teacher is on the leading edge of technology at School District 43 for one simple reason: He shuns paper and asks his Grade 7 students to submit their assignments online.
Accepting digital copies of journal entries, reading responses and other written projects, and putting his assignments online eliminates clutter, reduces paper and is more efficient for students, Exley says.
"It's like a file folder set-up," he said. "When they put work in, it comes to me, and I mark it and I address it back to them, and they can see the comments."
Since November, Exley said he has received more than 1,000 assignments from his Language Arts and Social Studies students, who he says are becoming better organized and don't lose their work as often as they used to.
"I'm doing my best to try and get rid of paper," he said. "(A), it's an expense and (B) it makes your classroom a mess."
He's not alone in trying to tackle the paper mountain. School District 43's energy manager, Mark Clay, is on a mission to reduce paper use in the district by 30% in the next three years. Over the next several weeks, he'll be surveying administrators, teachers and support workers to determine their precise paper consumption and how much they print and photocopy documents.
"Our goal is not to move away from paper books and those worthwhile things," Clay said. "But we want people to acknowledge the more we consume, the more it's having an effect on environment and economics. We want to understand more clearly what people copy, what people print and how much."
Results from the survey will be used to figure what resources can be moved online and, perhaps, cut down on the number of documents that are printed.
"With technology, printing has become very easy," said Clay, noting if printing were less convenient and there were more online options, the district could reduce its paper consumption and cut its cost and environmental footprint.
Last year, for example, the district bought 43,360 packages of paper (the equivalent of 21,680,000 letter-size sheets) and will have to pay approximately $7,500 in carbon offsets for paper consumption because of provincial legislation that requires school districts, hospitals and other government authorities to be carbon-neutral.
"The motivation is, it's good for the environment [to reduce paper consumption] and it's cost effective on many levels," Clay said.
It won't be easy to reduce the paper glut however. Ironically, while it demands those carbon offsets, the province also requires many school documents in hard copy. As well, putting more documents online will stretch the district's already limited internet resources.
Changing behaviour is also a challenge, Clay acknowledges, but if technology can be harnessed to do what it was meant to do - make people's lives easier and reduce paper - he'll win more converts.
"It doesn't happen overnight. But we're moving, we're doing our best," he said.
Teachers may be among the first to make the change once they see the benefits. Citadel's Exley said it took him a while to scrounge up the courage to start his virtual classroom using the district's My43 web portal but now he says: "It allows me to do so many more things. If the kids are organized, they do [the work] faster, and if they are disorganized, I can keep on top of them."
If every student had a laptop, Exley said, he could take his virtual classroom to the next level - but that's a project and budget discussion for another day.
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