I will update my previous post about setting up my new classroom once it’s finished. I just got started today, and I have a lot left to do still. Instead of talking about that, today I want to talk technology.

My school has Google Apps for Education, and I just set up Google Classroom pages for each of my classes. I haven’t figured out everything it does yet, or all of the ways that I can use it, but it seems like it could greatly simplify and streamline many things for me. I am bad at keeping track of paper. It ends up in terrible, messy stacks all over my room between extra copies, no-name papers, work left on the floor half-completed, and papers that were passed back when kids were absent. Ideally, I would go completely paperless. However, as my principal would say, I need to start somewhere and start small.

Almost all of my students have smartphones, tablets, iPod touches, or laptops that they bring with them. Actually, out of about 80 kids last year, I can only think of one student who did not bring any of the aforementioned technology with him daily. Access to technology is not a problem for my students.

One thing I’m thinking of doing is moving my warm-up questions and activities to announcements on Google Classroom. Unless I’m mistaken, students should be able to type in their answers as comments. I would also give them the option of doing it on lined paper if they don’t have their devices or if they prefer pen and paper in order to be as inclusive as possible. I’m thinking the same could go for writer’s notebooks, metacognitive reading logs, and other writing assignments throughout the year.

I could also post links to images for students to write about, or to historical documents, or to all kinds of things that I have been printing in poor quality in the past, making them easier to view while also saving the district money on color printing.

I will do a lot more with it in my yearbook and newsletter class. In fact, I think that class will be completely paperless by the second trimester this year, once I’ve got a good handle on how everything works.

I have one question/concern that I would love for people to respond to, though. How do you get administrators on board with the purposeful use of student devices in the classroom?

All in all, this sounds like a teacher research project in the making to me.