9 Tools for Making the Classroom

Paperless
Posted on June 10, 2019 by Nik Peachey | No comments yet

There are many reasons for making your classroom paperless. Beyond the
ecological ones of saving paper and hours of time and stress spent in front of
a photocopier to produce multiple handouts that end up forgotten in a folder
somewhere. There are also the more pedagogical drivers of building
students’ digital literacies and making our materials more interactive and
engaging. Digital materials are also a great way to make good use of those
students’ mobile devices and keep their attention on using the screen for
learning rather than other distractions.

In this article I’d like to share with you a few of the tools and applications
that I use in my training sessions and materials design work to cut out the
paper and add some opportunities for the development of digital literacy
skills and a greater degree of student autonomy.

BACK CHANNEL CHAT

The first and primary tool that I use in all of my classes and training sessions
is a backchannel. A backchannel is a type of online chatroom where you and
your students can interact through text and share links and digital materials.

My Back Channel of choice at the moment

is: http://backchannelchat.com/ This enables me to create a chat room that
all my students can join using a simple code. I can then set tasks for them
and share resources for the tasks there.
Once the students are in the back channel, any materials I share open
directly on their mobile device, so I don’t have the wasted time of trying to
get them to type complex URLs into the address bar of their browser.

BackChannelChat has been purpose built for teaching and so it has a lot of
useful additional features for moderating comments, pinning tasks to the top
of the window and for locking the room when you aren’t there.

Although there’s a perfectly good free version I pay a subscription fee of $15
a year and this gives me some additional features that include creating
multiple rooms, and preparing files, links and polls before class, so when I’m
in class it’s easier and quicker to click and share the materials I want my
students to use.
THE QR CODE GENERATOR
QR codes are great if you want to get materials onto your students’ digital
devices really quickly and you don’t want to set up a back channel. All the
students need to do is to open their QR code scanner, point their phone at
the code and they can instantly download, images, video, audio, links to
websites or text onto their device.
This can make working with digital media so much easier and your students
can each have a copy on their phone, so for example if you are doing a
listening or viewing activity, students can listen at their own pace and stop
and rewind wherever they like.

QR codes are easy to create. Just copy a link to whatever media you want to
share with your students and paste it into a site like: https://www.the-qrcode-
generator.com/ This will produce an image code that you can save and add
to a presentation slide, poster or paper worksheet.
Your students can download a free QR code scanner
from: https://tapmedia.co.uk/more-apps.htm

TELEGRAPH
If, like most teachers, you already have quite a few worksheets and lesson
materials that you have created using something like MS Word you can easily
convert these to online materials. These may just be text or they may also
have links to websites, video or audio that students have to copy into their
web browser.

Using https://telegra.ph/ you can quickly and easily convert these worksheets
into web-based worksheets that you simply share a link to through the
backchannel or with a QR code.
Telegra.ph is very simple to use. You just give the document a title and a
date or the name of the class and then add the text or instruction. You can
paste in any links to digital materials and if you have videos that you want
students to watch just paste in the link and the video will appear in your
worksheet. The click on ‘Publish’ and share the link with your students.
Link: https://telegra.ph/Spring-06-05

GENIALLY
If you really want to take your materials design to the next level, then you
must try: https://www.genial.ly Genially is a web-based HTML5 editor and it
allows you to create very dynamic and interactive materials.
One of the great things about Genially is that it has lots of really nicely
designed templates that you can adapt and add your own content to as well
as giving you access to lots of images, gifs, icons and animated art work that
you can add to your materials.
There are lots of educational templates too, and these are simple to edit. The
educational section includes quizzes, posters, infographic templates as well
as presentations. Once you have created your materials you can simply
share a link to them with your students and they will work on any mobile
device in the browser, so no need for downloading apps.
Here’s an example worksheet that I created using Genially: A Trip to
Cambridge [https://view.genial.ly/5c41e2e368cf4e1f866668c2]

PRIMARYPAD
In order to really develop our students writing skills for the digital world, the
writing tasks we use need to be digital and collaborative. To achieve this I
use: https://primarypad.com
This is a great tool that enables you or your students to create a simple
unique piece of digital paper. Any student that has a link to the piece of
paper can then write on and edit it.

The contributions of each students are then colour coded and matched to
their name. There is also a chat window that runs along side the text so you
can interact with students while they write and give encouragement.
PrimaryPad is very quick and simple to use and doesn’t require students to
log in. They can use the site to create documents, write text and then share
the link to enable another student to peer edit. You can even have groups of
students working on the text at the same time. (Beware of having more than
four students on one text as this can become chaotic.)

CUEPROMPTER
As a novice teacher I spent many a lesson setting time limits and trying to
get my students to gist read text. This always ended the same way, with
most students stopping to check words they don’t understand and slowly
plodding their way through to the end of the text.

Nowadays I have a solution to the problem and it comes in the form of a cue
prompter: https://www.cueprompter.com/. Using the cue prompter and a
projector I can paste or type in any text and then convert it to a scrolling text
that students can read from the screen.

Once I’ve pasted in my text I can select the text size and then when I launch
the cue prompter I can also select the speed at which the students read.
Then I just set my gist questions and click on ‘Forward’ and the text starts to
scroll. It’s easy to replay and pause the text later if I want to focus on specific
elements.
In this way I can take control of the speed that my students read at, stop
them from checking every word in their dictionary and keep their attention
up and on the screen.

MILANOTE
If you believe as I do that there is more to taking notes than listening to a
teacher and trying to write down and remember what they say, then you
may well enjoy https://www.milanote.com/.
Milanote is a great tool for taking and sharing notes from online and offline
sources. It’s a little like a digital cork board that you can pin interactive sticky
notes to. You can add to-do lists, note cards, upload documents and images
or links to websites and videos. This is an example that has some research I
was doing into process
writing: https://app.milanote.com/1F9rWA11C0YheR/process-writing(This one
is locked so you can’t edit it.)

You can get students to use this to do their own research into subjects you
want them to explore, or you can set up some resources that they research
like this one I used to get my students planning a trip to
Cambridge: https://app.milanote.com/1F9ovc11C0WDeZ/cambridge.
Milanote works really well on mobile devices too and it’s easy to get students
to share their notes with you and each other.

ONLINE FILE STORAGE

One of the great things about going paperless is that you can have all of your
teaching materials available wherever you are and you don’t need to carry
an extra bag for them. Putting all your teaching materials onto a cloud-based
service such as Google Drive, DropBox or Mega enables you to access them
from your phone or any computer within minutes. Most web-based services
enable you to share links with your students directly from the service you
use, so there is no need to email round large attachments. You can just paste
the links into your back channel or create a QR code that enables students to
download them.

SCREENCASTING FOR HOMEWORK

Lastly, when it comes to marking homework, digital can make that so much
easier and more effective too. Instead of reading through your students’
hand written submissions and trying to find space to comment, you can get
them to submit digital homework and then use a screen recording tool
like Jing or ScreencastOmatic to talk them through the work and any
improvements you think they could make. Then when you are finished you
can send them the video with your feedback and they can watch it as many
times as they need to.
So, these simple free apps can provide you with everything you need, not
only to make your classroom paperless, but to enhance the materials you
already use, help build students’ digital literacy skills and keep your students
engaged in media rich content.

If you have any ideas about how we can reduce our environmental
impact within the EFL sector and have been teaching for more than
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 Nik Peachey is a freelance writer, teacher
trainer and consultant specialising in digital publishing, online course
development and the development of digital resources for teachers. Since
1992 he has worked all over the world as a teacher, trainer and project
manager. He was Global Head of Learning for Macmillan’s online English
school EnglishUp from 2014 to 2016. In 2016 he won his second British
Council Award for Innovations (ELTon) and co-founded PeacheyPublications
Ltd.