My case against paperless schooling

This post originally appeared as a reply to a post on the NYCIST email chain for technologists working in independent schools in the Greater-NYC area.

As an English-teacher-turned-educational technologist, I'm still actively pushing back against the push to go "all digital." Here are a few of my reasons:

1. Research: I try to keep up on the cognitive research comparing retention and engagement on etexts versus paper, and my sense is that it's still favoring paper, though perhaps we're not sure why.
2. Anecdotal experience: This turns up in the research, but I'll call it anecdotal because it factors so heavily into my own experience reading extensively in both forms. When reading electronically, unless I'm reading .pdfs, which reproduce static, printed pages, I find it much harder to recall where in a given text a moment occurred. Search can help, but the point is about memory. There is a visual component to how we remember printed pages: we tend to remember where on the page text appeared, and we may even remember how far into the book it was (how thick the pages were on either side).
3. Industry woes: Though some digital platforms (e.g. Notability) have achieved "best of both worlds" annotation functionality, combining functions for freehand drawing/underlining/symbols with typing, the mess over copyright in the publishing industry means that most texts can only be accessed in highly limited e-reader apps like Kindle, which, for instance, can't do freehand annotation, and won't show your annotations and the text simultaneously.

Of course there are marvelous benefits to e-texts as well. Interactivity and dynamism can better illustrate certain concepts than mere static text. Searchable text is a dream, as is collecting all of my annotations in one place.

I used to envision an all-digital future. Now, with the advent of increasingly creative hybrids like the Rocketbook notebook, I’m not so sure. If there are unique advantages to both print and digital media, why should we have to limit ourselves to one or the other?

Use Microsoft Word to See Exactly What's Changed Between Drafts

INTERVIEWER: How much rewriting do you do?
HEMINGWAY: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
INTERVIEWER: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?
HEMINGWAY: Getting the words right. 

(Ernest Hemingway, "The Art of Fiction," The Paris Review Interview, 1956)

I'm a firm believer that revision makes the writer. So as a writing teacher, I always require substantial revision (you can read here about how it manifests in my grading policy). But of course, reading several successive drafts of the same student essays can be downright impractical. 

Enter the "Compare Documents" feature in Microsoft Word. Stop trying to discern differences between drafts by holding them side-by-side. Let Word do it for you!

Using this feature allows me immediately to see what has changed from one draft to the next, and to flip  between the two versions. I can even see the digital comments I left on the original draft, and quickly assess whether revisions have addressed them. (Gone are the days of rereading an entire ten-page essay to determine the student only changed one sentence on page three...)

Check out the tutorial:

PDF Version of the Tutorial

Collect digital submissions directly to Evernote

Evernote makes life easier. It's been central to my going (mostly) paperless and compiling student portfolios. Because my students don't yet all have Evernote--I'm deciding still if I'd like them to--I've had to devise a workaround to automatically collect their submissions into my notebooks.

I'd be interested to hear why the folks at Evernote haven't made this any easier. It could be they're worried about security, and/or that they're pushing a model whereby everyone has Evernote and just shares notebooks. (That's how it's done at Montclair Kimberly Academy)

My trick begins with the unique email address that Evernote grants every user, and their system for coding an email's subject line to file it in the correct notebook with your desired tags.

Since I don't know any code, I had to look long and hard for a web platform to create what I wanted: an embeddable form that could collect file submissions and send an email with the files attached, drawing on users' responses for the subject line and body text. JotForm was my favorite, but their free offering couldn't handle my number of submissions per month. (UPDATE: Looks like EmailMeForm and JotForm now have the same limit of 100 free submissions/month. Darn)

I eventually settled on EmailMeForm.


Let me walk you through the process:

I want to file submissions into notebooks by class section, and I want them all tagged "unread"

Here's what it looks like to build the form on EmailMeForm. For security, you can change the properties of the File Upload box(es) to only accept desired file types (e.g., .doc, .docx)

EmailMeForm allows you to craft the email notification with the form responses

Use "Dynamic Tokens" to populate the subject line with users' form responses (in this case, their name and their class section). Don't forget the @ before the desired notebook name, and # before the desired tag

EmailMeForm helps you out with the dynamic tokens

Here's what the resulting email looks like:

Here's the final form, embedded on my homework site:

And here's the resulting note in Evernote:

Defining Custom Styles in Microsoft Word 2011 -- Makes Proofreading a Breeze!

Here's a trick for defining custom styles to highlight errors in student work. Giving each custom style a shortcut key makes proofreading a breeze!



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