Welcome to my paper-hating blog!
This blog is where I am going to document some of the great tools I find to use in the classroom as well as to help stay organized professionally and personally.
On my page titled "About Mrs. Khatthaname" I go into why I've created this blog but simply put, I hate paper. I don't like organizing it, storing it, making copies (and as a teacher that is a lot of copies!), having to recycle or throw away those copies that you spent so much time on... I just hate it.
Hate is a strong word... but YEP, HATE it.
In my classroom, my students learn to do quite a bit on the computer. We are a one-to-one device school which means each of the students has a device for school. In our building, those devices are Lenovo Laptops. As soon as I got my cart I was all over it! My students were using Edmodo, publishing their writing as word documents, learning to format, uploading assignments... As many skills that I could possibly teach them that I thought would be beneficial in the workplace, I went for it. It also made my job so much easier! Instead of making a ton of copies of that quiz I just created then have to go through and grade, I published it on Edmodo and my job was done. Questions that are multiple choice, fill in the blank, or matching get graded for me. All I had to do was look through the written responses. It was on my computer and online which is always with me so I could do this whenever it was convenient (without carrying stacks of paper everywhere I go).
That was not the case with many teachers. They used it for Imagine Learning. And that was about it... Imagine Learning is a great program that helps kids with language skills that our district seems to really love, but let's call it what it is... a video game. It teaches absolutely no computer skills as it is a click, click, click program. No typing is involved, no navigation skills, no problem solving, no tech skills whatsoever.
Well, my goal for my school is to help spread some tech knowledge to other teachers. Not every class will end up a "paperless" class, nor will all teachers even want that, but my hope is that I can help my colleagues by showing ways to make things simpler using technology and encourage them to instill computer skills in their little humans. They are going to need them when they go to college and/or the workforce.
I hope that my blog is helpful for someone out there. If not then I will use it to practice my writing skills :P.
