photo by NoHoDamonI love to teach as paperless as possible. My students read more off a projector than off of paper. I wish we had the technology available to be much more paperless at my school- something to strive for.Then I think, well, if I want to be paperless in my classroom, I should be paperless personally. Share all that info from the paper on the blog and get rid of the paper altogether, right? It’s not like I actually look at all that paper ever anyway. I just did what we all (should) do at the end of the school year- I cleaned my classroom. I say ‘should’ because I don’t. The last few years I’ve left my notebooks either on my bookshelf or in a closet and then put them back in the same place when school is back in, not to be looked at all year.This year I was told I had to move all the books off my bookshelf for the summer so the floor-waxing crew didn’t have to box them up when they remove the bookcase. So as I moved the books to a storage room on a different floor, I looked at all of them with a critical eye, and a *lot* of paper went in the trash. I went through my notebooks I made in college for my teaching methods courses and the bad pedagogy astounded me. Really beautiful, thematic, well-presented notebooks -I’m telling you, you would have been impressed- full of information that shouldn’t even have been written and hasn’t affected my life (thankfully) since.Also on the shelf were programs and notes and handouts from conferences and vendor booths, things I swore I was going to look at, review, and share later, and never did. So I’ve brought them home, and I’ve told myself that before I throw them out, they must become digital. The pile is the source of a lot of hopefully helpful blog posts, so stay tuned.What about you? What jewels are sitting on your bookshelf that could become your own paperless way of sharing with your professional learning network via a blog?
I gotta say, I haven't dragged out the ol' college notebooks in a while, but I find myself returning to some things I thought of then. For example, I made a portfolio on interdisciplinary learning, and here I am FINALLY figuring out essential questions for Spanish and earnestly trying to connect STEM classes with Spanish! And I DID actually drag out a unit I'd designed on the novel Speak (for English, of course), and just tweak it!
I was so smart when I was younger. What happened to me?
As for the stuff I used when I started teaching SPANISH, most of that died with my first couple of flashdrives and the demise of Geocities–though there were some lyrics I'd typed up that I wish I still had!
Good for you – I was so dumb when I was younger! I didn't know what a portfolio was and designing a unit? What's that? Novels? Pshaw. Most of my beautiful transparencies read at the top: "Translate the following [sentences you'd never use but I contrived them to carefully practice target grammar]." I think everything good on that shelf came from someone else! I'm starting to think of myself as a great recycler of other people's ideas, lol.