#Should schools go paperless drivers
#Should schools go paperless code

Just copy a link to whatever media you want to share with your students and paste it into a site like: This will produce an image code that you can save and add to a presentation slide, poster or paper worksheet. This can make working with digital media so much easier and your students can each have a copy on their phone, so for example if you are doing a listening or viewing activity, students can listen at their own pace and stop and rewind wherever they like. All the students need to do is to open their QR code scanner, point their phone at the code and they can instantly download, images, video, audio, links to websites or text onto their device. QR codes are great if you want to get materials onto your students’ digital devices really quickly and you don’t want to set up a back channel. Once the students are in the back channel, any materials I share open directly on their mobile device, so I don’t have the wasted time of trying to get them to type complex URLs into the address bar of their browser.īackChannelChat has been purpose built for teaching and so it has a lot of useful additional features for moderating comments, pinning tasks to the top of the window and for locking the room when you aren’t there.Īlthough there’s a perfectly good free version I pay a subscription fee of $15 a year and this gives me some additional features that include creating multiple rooms, and preparing files, links and polls before class, so when I’m in class it’s easier and quicker to click and share the materials I want my students to use. I can then set tasks for them and share resources for the tasks there. My Back Channel of choice at the moment is: This enables me to create a chat room that all my students can join using a simple code. A backchannel is a type of online chatroom where you and your students can interact through text and share links and digital materials. The first and primary tool that I use in all of my classes and training sessions is a backchannel. In this article I’d like to share with you a few of the tools and applications that I use in my training sessions and materials design work to cut out the paper and add some opportunities for the development of digital literacy skills and a greater degree of student autonomy. Digital materials are also a great way to make good use of those students’ mobile devices and keep their attention on using the screen for learning rather than other distractions.

#Should schools go paperless drivers

There are also the more pedagogical drivers of building students’ digital literacies and making our materials more interactive and engaging. Beyond the ecological ones of saving paper and hours of time and stress spent in front of a photocopier to produce multiple handouts that end up forgotten in a folder somewhere. There are many reasons for making your classroom paperless.