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The Sunday Telegraph ran an article called The school with no paper on page 40 of their paper on October 19, 2008. It’s about Manildra Public School – a small primary school between Orange and Parkes in Western NSW – which is ‘virtually paperless’. Children have daily handwriting lessons to ensure their writing skills aren’t lost, but the rest of their work is done digitally via email, the web and computer programs.
The teacher says he doesn’t see the point in kids “coming into the classroom and ruling up a page like they did in 1955″ and calls paperless classrooms “the future of schooling”. From the article, the students certainly seem to enjoy it.
As I have talked before about the disadvantages of a paperless classroom I will instead look at what applications this can have for an English classroom. Assuming each student has access to their own computer, it gives the opportunity for more student-centred learning, building on student interests. This could link in well with the ‘Area of Study’ concept, in which senior English students study one main text about the theme ‘Belonging’ and are then asked to find complementary texts that deal with the same theme. In a more digitally-based classroom, teachers could build on this concept from the lower years of highschool, familiarising students with the concept of finding thematically linked texts on the internet. Just one of, I’m sure, many ideas.
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