BFTP: Paper-free Commitee-ment

Every snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty. Stanislaw J. Lec

Note that I wrote this 5 years ago so numbers are from then and from the Mankato Schools. I did not do a analysis of the printing being done when I left last August.)

Our district spends about $400,000 on printing ($60 per student) each year - and that doesn't count computer printers, just photocopying. The print-shop in my department which is supposed to be for "big jobs" pushes out 6-7 MILLION impressions each year (nearly 1,000 per student) and this doesn't include the copying done in each of our individual buildings (so you can safely double that number). That works out to about 12 impressions per student per day (2000/170).

What might it take to make a school district, if not paperless, at least less paper dependent for both financial and ecological reasons?

I believe our adoption of GoogleApps for Education is a good first step. For those who wish to do so, sharing information electronically just got a whole lot simpler because of Apps. It's easy and fast to simply create (or upload) a document to Docs, then invite others to view it, either as individuals or as members of a Group. It's easier than using e-mail attachments - and a whole lot easier than printing, copying and mailing.

But how does one change a "paper-trained" mindset like that of a large organization like ours?

About all I can do, I believe, is lead by example.  I make the committees I run paper-less. What does it take?

• Using all electronic agendas, minutes and handouts ... and having a strong will to resist the temptation not to make paper copies for the meeting itself. OK, I know people will print agendas and bring them to the meeting. I didn't JUST fall off the turnip truck. Isn't this just redistributing the printing instead of reducing it? Sure many people will print everything sent to them. But some, perhaps a growing number, won't. And there won't be those extra copies made for those who didn't make it to the meeting. Oh, making these documents editable as well as viewable opens up a whole new means of group participation.
• Sharing information in meetings via projection rather than handouts. An LCD projector with the agenda, reports and activities makes sense to me. If people want a written record, they can use their own notebooks, scrap paper or...
• Allowing Inviting members to bring laptops, PDAs, netbooks, smartphones, etc to meetings. To access committee information and take notes. Oh, have open wireless access to make these devices maximally useful.
• Keeping a reliable and accessible archive of past committee communications digitally. Many of us of the paper-trained generation just trust paper copies more than online -probably due to early bad digital storage experiences. Both GoogleDrive, Gmail's large storage capacity and Group's discussion sections allow communications to be easily stored and retrieved without resorting to dead trees and petrochemicals.

When asked about the cost savings expected by the adoption of GoogleApps, not needing to update and support an in-house mailserver and client software is the most immediate reason. Sure, there is a little cost savings there. But what if we could, because of simple electronic document sharing, cut our printing costs in half? What if, by moving to cloud-based applications, we could supply $300 Chromebooks to kids instead of $1000 laptops? And when all kids have devices, can't we start to decrease the money we spend on textbooks by using Curriki, Moodle, and other teacher-created resources? And further reduce copying costs as well.

(2015 - The adoption of GoogleClassroom may also expedite the paper-lite environment.)

Meaningful paper reduction will mean everyone thinking twice about how necessary any copy is to make. See below...

 Original post January 21, 2010

Close the digital divide by connecting students at home- EL Feb 15 column

My PowerUp column, Helping to close the digital divide in the February issue of ASCD's Educational Leadership, is now available online. Enjoy.

The holy grail of the 5 Nines

In 2011 there were 18 passenger flights worldwide that resulted in fatalities. In that year, the US alone had 10 million flights. If 99% of flights in the US were safe (meaning 1% of flights resulted in fatalities), there would be an alarming 100,000 flights with fatalities in the US each year. 

99.99% safety would still be a frightening 1000 flights with fatalities each year.

Incredibly, that means that even if all 18 of the passenger flights with fatalities in 2011 had been in the US, the safety rate for US flights that year would have been greater than 99.9998% The fact that none of those passenger airline flight fatalities occurred in the US means the actual safety rate for that year is even greater. Andy Chen, Quora

Our Internet connection has been down 33 minutes since the beginning of the school year - out of a total of 231,830 minutes in the past 23 weeks. That give us a downtime of about .014% or 99.986% uptime.  (According to the numbers above, we would have lost only about 150 planes last year.)

Ten years or so ago our local telephone company took a bunch of tech folks to a big seminar in Minneapolis to help us learn about VOIP (Voice over Internet protocol) - the then newish technology that allowed delivering telephone services over our computer network instead of dedicated analog lines.

At the time, the telcos were heavily invested in traditional telephone service so the big takeaway from that meeting was that the only technology in operation that met the 5 Nines criteria - that it works 99.999% of the time -  was, you guessed it, the analog telephone system.

A concern was raised recently about whether building emergency plans should rely on e-mail as a means of communicating to those in buildings about a possible threat or emergency. "What if the Internet goes down?" was the gist of the worry.

While nothing is certain and a technology-free backup plan is a good thing, I am not sure just how much time I'd spend worrying about a failure rate of .014% - especially when you multiply that times the 1 in 1 million odds of a student being killed in a school shooting.

I am an English, not a math, major so my numbers may be off. But I'll bet the farm that spending time working on building emergency plans that circumvent modern communication methods is time that could be better spent. On nearly anything.