the project

Two or three years ago, fed up with carting piles of exercise books to and from school, I ditched them in favour of homework completed and submitted electronically, using Acrobat.com (like Google docs but much nicer). I haven’t looked back since. About the same time, I tried with a small teaching set to go completely paper free. The Asus 7 inch eee pc netbooks were all the rage and we had some of those. Which were fine, even when Marietta tried pouring orange juice over the keyboard of her machine. That project died a death for two reasons: (1) my taking a sabbatical part way through the year, and (2) the failure of the existing wireless network in School to get anyway close to working.

So the installation of what seems to be a highly effective wireless network over the summer break and the School’s plans to run a number of mobile device pilots this year rekindled my enthusiasm and made me think about giving the paper-free thing another go.

The plan? To see if you can teach a modern language without the teacher or the students using paper in the process. Can we do it? Who knows, but we are going to give it a go.

The hardware I talk about elsewhere, but essentially we all have 10 inch netbooks, plus the classroom desktop and access to an IT suite once a fortnight. And whatever else is available at home.

Homework is taken care of by Acrobat.com, as mentioned before. And it is set via the class blog, as per usual, so no writing down homework required.  The class exercise book is replaced by a mini whiteboard. Vocabulary will be noted in Tables, the Acrobat.com version of Excel – ideal for the purpose because of tabs and filters. Grammar and topic notes will be done using the web app version of Microsoft OneNote, chosen again because of its tabbed pages  feature. The textbook has been scanned into a pdf version linked from the class course on our VLE, which is Moodle. On that are housed all the resources and links that we will use throughout the year, in the classroom or at home.

All of which sounds great. The bases are covered. How can we fail? I don’t think we will do that, but I am sure that we will hit a few problems along the way and that we will encounter the unexpected and eventualities that we haven’t thought of in advance. The one thing that is certain is that it will not be a dull journey.