My paperless class

Last year I started getting into Evernote and using it fairly regularly. This increased over the course of the year and I signed up for a Premium account in June last year. I started reading more and more posts about going paperless and having a paperless classroom. The most influential blog on this topic came from Nicholas Provenzano - The Nerdy Teacher and his 'Epic Evernote Experiment (here's a link to it). It has been fantastic reading his experience of doing this in his classes and it has got me thinking about this more and more.

So, I decided to make a step in this direction and launch my first paperless class. My Year 10 Modern History classes this semester will be entirely paperless using the absolutely amazing Evernote (I'm a huge fan of Evernote and constantly encourage people to use it for everything in their lives). Here is how I went about doing it.

Paperless Class Part 1

Modern History Term 3: The most significant events of the 20th century

The first lesson was about introducing the topic and the concept of going paperless to a group of 19 Year 10 students. Initial reaction was mixed, but most seem to embrace the concept and open to the idea. I went through an Evernote tutorial and helped each student set up an Evernote account, install the web clipper and create a notebook. Most managed to get on quite easily and have it installed, however their were a few technical issues with some student laptops that did not get resolved straight away. By the next lesson, they were all ready to go.

I had set up a class notebook where I would share all notes, pdf's, images and assessments with them.

My Notebook shared with students

The next step involved them sharing their individual notes with me. This would allow me to see their progress and a way to track their learning. I placed all the shared notebooks from the students in a notebook stack:

Our topic on greatest events would cover a brief overview of the 20th century, followed by a focus study on 9/11 attack and then introducing their assessment piece. Each of these I will cover over the next blog posts.  

If you have any questions, please leave a comment or email me, or send me a message via twitter @jdtriver.