Heart of the Problem

Photocopiers are in essence a scanner, largely operated by someone else. The yellow sheets are the order for student sets of prints. I suspect that if you are not a Web2.0 driven teacher, then this is a very comforting and normal photo. Of course if you are in a hurry then you use the small copier, but essentially, work is scanned and printed. It is then distributed to students.

A staff room printer is pretty much the same deal. Teachers copy, paste and create vast amounts of worksheets. Word is your friend. Why do they do this? Perhaps because the PC is attached to a printer which churns out familiar paper. It may be the nice warm toner smell, but I think it is more to do with familiarity. The ICT Literate teacher therefore produces and document, prints it and hands it out.

Before the internet arrived in the staff room, the photocopier was head of production, when handwritten or ‘black line masters’ we used – largely to produce the exact same product. So what has changed in the last decade? Perhaps only that teachers have greater access to PCs and staffroom printers.

Hogging the printer, producing a class set is frowned upon. So a master is made and then taken down to the print room, a yellow order filled out and the set are printed and handed out.

My thoughts have turned to the life span and long term value of the issued copy. It can be a worksheet – handed out, completed, handed back and marked and handed back. Occasionally, direct one to one comments are made to students. Students on the whole see that as the end of the matter. It was important at the time, but now it is over it gets stuck in the backpack. How long does it live on? Is it an effective literacy tool that the student can use later?

Learning to use the scanner however is a complex thing in many teacher’s opinion. You have to interact with it. You could scan the document and put it online, but that is not normal. The accepted process is just as I’ve said above … the end product is paper based. Always paper based.

But a photocopier is a scanner. Most network copiers, with a little IT thought it can file documents in a known location on the LAN. Students could find it and use it.

But that is not what copiers are supposed to do, so we don’t do that. It now how technology is supposed to be used.

A staff room scanner is simple too.

Insert paper, press the scan button and then you have a file. Okay, here’s the rub – the file format is different -yes I know scary isn’t it. It is not an Office document but a JPEG -what’s that?

Surely scanning a document and then printing it is a better idea?

You won’t need to scan it next year (if you are one of those who like to revist a well trodden annual cycle). But instead of that, the cycle of print/copy/issue/complete/mark/hand back is preferable.

Its good to know from a teachers point of view that no matter how non-IT you are, you can still issue documents on mass via the copier.

A STUDENT PERSPECTIVE

I interviewed a group of senior students about what paperwork they had on them. They said that they received on average about 80 sheets of paper a week. A mixture of tasks, worksheets and come reference matter. Given the amount of syllabus material teachers must get through, then handing out reference notes is again, a known, accepted method of delivery of information.

I asked them how much of that material they read. Honestly, they said they speed read it and look for phrases from questions. This could end up in a literacy debate about literacy – so I’ll omit that for now. How much did they remember (ouch, read/recite) and how much they can use to build new applied knowledge (blank looks). Eventually they suggested that they took notice or used about 60% of it. They said that not all of it is relevant (to the question/task), so they don’t bother with it.

Next I asked how many of the sheets they have kept since starting year 12. They said about 40%. The paper they keep is usually reference material or exam practice – the rest are worksheets that have no long term value to carry around.

COSTINGS

80 sheets a week over a year works out at about $320.00 worth of charge-back to the KLA per student. We have 8 KLAs ($2560 per year). So a HSC course consumes about $5120.00 worth of paper resources per student at charge back rates. This is based on time/labour/materials/depreciated assets at $0.10 a sheet.

Lets assume that the costs are as low as possible, $0.01 a sheet. Now consider that an EeePC from ASUS is currently $499 RRP and that an iPodTouch 8gig is $399.00. This seems on par with even the most skeptical mathematics.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

If teachers adopted a new method of delivery – digitally – which I can’t think ultimately takes the school any less time to actually produce (teacher/photocopy technician) – then we could deliver this information via courseware (Moodle) or one of the many Web2.0 service offering digital paper storage (iPaper).

This requires a SHIFT in thinking. We could justify the issue every senior student with a ‘digital device’ – WiFi enabled, digital storage and playback of multimedia delivery – which has many more features than paper (read it/fold it/scrunch it). If they then want a hard copy, then can print it out using a low volume printer. The costs of the photocopier are slashed. We could reduce consumption and cost – the photocopy tech is re-named a scanning technician. The role is merely shifted. Work is placed online, not on a shelf for collection. Students have 1 to 1 access to it 24/7.

There are significant benefits to students having digital resources, not least the fact that 100% of the information issued thoughout the course is available 100% of the time. They cannot loose it, and months later can refer back to it. I am sure there are plenty more ways to use it – and I haven’t even started at making documents hyper – I’m sticking to existing behaviour observation.

In summary my point is that if schools shift their thinking, adjust the way they fund ‘knowledge transfer’ then it the cost is absorbed. The problem is that the teacher may have to give up their love affair with the mass photocopier.