The Paper-Free Class
My name is Mr. Hays and I teach 6th grade Language Arts at Ponce de Leon Middle School. I am a National Board Certified teacher, and I have been reflecting on my role as a teacher this past summer. This year, I have decided to try a radically different approach to teaching. We have been focused on test scores far too long; unfortunately, however, they still impact our lives as teachers on a daily basis. I want to step away from the traditional classroom for a while and see just how much we can do online. Between electronic textbooks, blogs, interactive sites, social networking, and digital portfolios, we should have more than enough tools at our fingertips to work with. This will be an interesting experiment and I look forward to trying something new!
The Paper-Free Class 
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Posted by corey | August 21, 2012, 12:42 pmwhat a great concept…sure would have liked to have something like this when I was in school! Good job!
Posted by Sumpter Chatter | January 31, 2013, 4:36 pmThis is a fantastic site! I am a biology teacher from the UK and I had a similar idea to yours to get my A level Biology students linked in to the power of social media and blogging as an educational tool. My site is nowhere near as developed as this one but I saw the write up on the main wordpress page when I went to log into my blog and it was like a light went on in my head. I thought, ‘here’s a guy who’s had the same idea as me but just executed it so much better.’ Looking at your site has given me so many ideas to improve my own.
I would be interested to hear what challenges you have faced getting this up and running and whether your students have been enthusiastic to use it or not.
Have a look at our site if you have time, it’s http://www.biologypost.wordpress.com.
Posted by biologypost | January 31, 2013, 5:24 pmFantastic idea of having your students go paperless. Would love to post some of your students’ essays on my blog so that mine could have an idea how native English speakers write. Do spare a minute and hop over to 2bitsworthofthoughts.wordpress.com and see whether we could work out some sort of students’ exchange thing? Do you think “East meet West” might help both our students? I work with kids ranging from 3 to 16.
Posted by rinekat | January 31, 2013, 9:27 pmMr. Hays, would you explain for the non-teachers among us, how this works? Are you giving lessons online, (videos? webcasts?) or are you still delivering lessons in the classroom with your pupils, and this site is therefore a paperless follow up learning facility? Do you teach different subjects and different classes (assume so)? Do the pupils have a learning support/IT system at the school that they already log into, or does all their online interaction happen on this site? Thank you for giving a little more background. I am interested in online and distance teaching and learning ideas.
Posted by phillymullett | February 1, 2013, 5:50 amCongrats on your site and your forward thinking for our kids who are the future for our country!
Posted by alesiablogs | February 1, 2013, 1:54 pmHello, I am a first year technology teacher in Texas. My 8th grade class is creating their own webpage. We all share the same account in order to make changes…which is a bit risky because they can make changes to it. How does this work – do the students all share the same login information to make posts? or do they have their own blogs and somehow “link” their work to this site to turn it in? Thanks for the feedback. Great motivation to other teachers – it can be done!
-sara
Posted by stpaultech | February 11, 2013, 10:26 amWe use a site called Edmodo for students to submit assignments. The students write their own blogs on Edublogs. I am the only one who posts on the main site. Thanks for your comments!
Posted by J Hays | February 12, 2013, 9:47 pmI Lauryn Louis understand the Classroom rules that were given to me.
Period 3
Posted by Lauryn Louis | September 4, 2014, 1:22 pm