Dive Brief:
- Kelly Mills Elementary School, located outside of Atlanta, is piloting a program that allows classrooms to go paper-free one day per week in an attempt to increase student and teacher engagement with ed tech.
- The school, just four years old, has always had a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy, and Principal Ron McAllister writes for eSchoolNews that the paper-free days came out of a staff brainstorming session focused on creating a more effective learning environment by reshuffling its resources.
- "Prior to launching our paper-free days, each classroom had an ActivPanel interactive flat panel installed," McAllister says, referencing a move designed to help ease the transition. "The panels went from being a scary, cumbersome piece of technology to becoming part of everyday life in the classroom."
Dive Insight:
According to McAllister, student engagement has "skyrocketed" and teachers have quickly grown more comfortable with using new ed tech in the classroom. Students not only were actively learning more, he writes, but they were also having more fun — something recently shown to be crucial to the maintenance of a growth mindset.
Recent studies have proven that such a mindset can advance cognitive functioning in students, specifically that there is "increased efficiency in brain activity during math thinking for students who believe 'intelligence or other skills can be improved with training and practice, rather than being fixed and inherent traits.'"
