New Learning practice: Paperless classrooms

Innovator: İsmail Onur, https://instagram.com/sehityzb.ozgurozekin?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

Organisation: Fethiye Şehit Yüzbaşı Özgür Özekin Mesleki ve Teknik Anadolu Lisesi

Setting of the practice: hybrid

Description of the practice:

Today, information and communication technologies (ICT), which provides fast access to information from anywhere, have become indispensable in our lives and in our classrooms.The roles of the teachers in raising the new generation are changing with the developing technology as well. Teachers and students should be supported to acquire technology literate competencies such as creating, editing and sharing the content of an educational material with web 2.0 technologies that contribute to educational processes. We believe that  these tools play a critical role in preparing students for the business and educational life of the 21st century and support their creative and critical thinking skills.

In this aspect,our English Department decided to encourage our students to use some digital tools that they can easily add to many activities they do in the classroom and at home. The challenges we wanted to overcome with this project;

1- To save time

2- To save resources

3- To become more environmentally-friendly

4- To promote collaboration

5- To prepare students to real-life conditions

 

In our project, our teachers and students didn’t use  textbooks and notebooks for exchanging information. They used computers, laptops, tablets, and mostly their mobile phones. All the activities related to the educational program were done electronically. All our classrooms have digital whiteboards and high speed internet connection.

The methods we used in our projects;

1- We stored pdf formats of textbooks,workbooks and worksheets to Google Drive.

2- We encouraged our students to use Canva to create their projects and homework and then upload them to Padlet so that teachers could check them.

3- Teachers and students interacted through Google Classroom.

4- We used Kahoot Gamification method in our classrooms.

We applied  our project ony for our 9th grade classes at first because they had 20 hours of English per-week. We believe we reduced  our paper usage and carbon footprint in those classrooms as well as integrating our students into technology.

Integrating Paperless Classrooms project to our school was a difficult task, but we believe it was very innovative process because keeping an open mind when learning about new technologies is essential to always be ready to learn and for a successful implementation.

There are many advantages of transferring ‘Paperless Classrooms’ and this transfer could be extremely useful for our schools and enviroment , but there are a few things to be careful of such as less face to face interaction,technical issues and cost of equipment.

 We believe that Paperless Classrooms make learning effective and enhance the students’ academic performance.