The Primary Paperless Classroom

A new school year brings new aspirations, my hope this year is to become a paperless classroom.  Well, not completely paperless.  Let's face it, in a primary classroom, children need manipulatives and they need tactile stimulation.  However, I want to use less paper in my room.  Students can record their learning in many different ways other than pencil and paper.  Last year, my students showed me many different ways they could record their learning.  A few of my favorites were:  wallwisher.com as a substitute for sticky notes.  It's a great tool for brainstorming or for showing learning.  Another favourite  is the Show Me app where students can draw and record themselves explaining their learning.  One of my new favourites for recording student learning is Creating movies with the iMovie app.
These are all great tools, but I wanted to try something new, I wanted to take it one step farther and have my students use the iPads like notebooks.  I wanted to be able to share worksheets, documents and assignments with my students through the iPads.
Many classrooms are paperless classrooms, however when I searched for primary paperless classrooms, mainly grade one and two classrooms, I couldn't find any.  It is difficult to find primary paperless classrooms because for the most part, many or all of these children do not have email addresses to share documents.
I searched and searched for a way to make this a reality.  I asked my PLN for help, unfortunately I came up empty handed.  Until, I put my husband @MrWideen on the case.  It didn't take him long to figure out a way to send out documents to my grade 1/2 students' iPads without them having email addresses and it being easy enough for 20 six and seven years to accomplish with a little practice.  Stay tuned for my next blog post to see how we did it.