PAPER WASTE NO MORE
Ed Sherretta, department chairman of the business and computer science department at Hatboro- Horsham (Pennsylvania) High School, has led the effort there to create a paperless school. "It's easy to find something on the Web and hit the print button," said Sherretta. The effort to go paperless is designed to raise awareness, he said.
School officials estimated that each of the 20 classes at Hatboro-Horsham used nearly 500 sheets of paper a week.
The idea of a paperless school was first entertained at a tree-planting ceremony on the school grounds. The desire to save trees and the ecology prompted, in part, the push for eliminating paper from the classroom.
Sherretta said the paperless initiative began with basic awareness programs to promote ideas for the digital distribution of data. Students and teachers now use network folders to collect and distribute anything from tests to homework over the school's intranet. Teachers receive morning bulletins and important documents electronically.
Online attendance could be available in the future also, Sherretta said. He acknowledges, however, that security needs to be tighter for something like grades to be available over the public Internet.
Well, maybe something fiberoptic would be more secure? Paperless schooling seems pretty brilliant but it's wild to see how drastically things will go paperless: banking, mailing, etc... It is so easy to press print, at my house i switch on the double sided print option. I wish more people would, it actually saves unbelievable amounts of paper, as a writer, printing out drafts, you can waste a lot of paper. The only thing I worry about is things like i realize with writing more on the computer vs. in a notebook or taking digital photos rather than film, is you spend so much time then on the computer editing and what not and it kills my eyes. Hm.. but paperless is great i think they should stop sending magazines, think of how much paper could be saved there.
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