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Paperless School

4 replies

BrightMauveLion · 19/01/2025 17:46

What are your thoughts on schools going paperless? This means no more exercise books or textbooks, etc. As a result schools would have to give students at least a iPad. Personally I don’t agree with it as exams are still handwritten.

OP posts:
MN2025 · 19/01/2025 18:04

Who is absorbing the cost of all this tech?
What’s the plans if tech is damaged or stolen?
Presumably students will take iPads home to do home work.

I don’t think this will work at all. It’s also promoting ‘screen time’

Saltandvin · 19/01/2025 21:44

Unfathomable in most primaries at the moment. We barely have the internet connection to get through a computing lesson where I am. We really don't use that much more tech than we did when i started 15 years ago, and I don't think that's unusual.

ThrallsWife · 20/01/2025 05:37

IME there are a number of pitfalls that will need to be carefully considered.

In a school I used to teach in, some students would sell their iPads to make cash - what is the replacement for this? Or any broken ones, stolen ones etc.

How strict are controls? Are staff able to carefully monitor and re-enable controls if necessary? Has the school factored in additional costs, such as app subscriptions, anti-virus subscriptions, maintenance, replacement costs after 6 or so years when the iPads fail due to age, additional insurance, server capacity, cloud storage, technician support?

Have staff had enough training? I'm forever being encouraged to use my iPad more efficiently, but I have had no training and am figuring a lot out as I'm going along. Doesn't mean I can necessarily trouble shoot in the classroom when our students are, again, unable to use their own iPads.

On that note, how much training have students had? We assume they're pretty tech savvy, but you'd be surprised how many don't have the faintest idea how to actually navigate tech other than a few online games.

Has a thorough risk assessment been done? It's well-known by now that long screen use damages eyesight and I can see a fair few lawsuits in the future when we have a generation of children who need glasses.

Is there a plan for offline work in the case of wifi outages?

Going paperless sounds great, but is a hell of a lot more expensive than the alternative.

Dendron123 · 20/01/2025 06:52

I worked in an Indy that wanted to go paperless. The number of cables you had to negotiate walking round the classroom…Theoretically, the students had to charge laptops at home. I asked some reliable students how long charge lasted. About 4 lessons…(out of 6)

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