Colleagues,
I receive these responses. The first section deals with tips on how to
reduce printing, and the last section has some software that were
suggested.
Thanks to all for the responses.
Danville Fourie
Fredericksburg City Public Schools
In the Library, we charge 5 cents per page printed on the laser printer
and 25 cents per page printed on the color printer. Every student is
told this when their classes come in for a Library orientation, and we
remind them when they check out a computer to use, and we have stickers
on each computer monitor.
In the Academic computer labs I also manage, the teacher must provide
the paper - the toner is provided by the departments as donations and
when it runs out, it runs out - so teachers are reminded to be
conservative.
I forgot to mention, in the Library, I've added a line to be printed on
the page header printing of every page printed from the Internet that
contains the name of the computer on it - just so we can tell who
printed what if someone doesn't want to confess or we notice someone is
printing excessively.
I know one school keeps the printer behind the circulation desk and
charges students five cents a page. This works well. I was thinking of
doing something similar next year.
Hope this helps,
We limit paper by charging for copies. Work the students type
themselves is free, but anything downloaded is charged at ten cents per
page. The printer is at the front desk, so it's easy to control.
Frankly, when I came here 4 years ago, I was sure this needed to be
changed. Now I am a convert. At previous schools, kids just printed
willy nilly, paying no attention to number of pages. Here, they learn
to download to a word document, so they only get what is important. We
still charge, but usualy it's only a page or two. It seems as though
this would be a real time waster for staff, but it's really not. Of
course, I have a full time assistant, and many student aides. At
several other schools in the district, they have a sort of charge system
- kids are alloted so much for print, and the fee is deducted
automatically from this amount. When their credit is used up, it's used
up. I'm not sure what program is used for this, but I could find out.
Well, here's mine. It's about as cost effective as you can get. Just
don't keep paper in the printers. Then students have to come and ask you
before they print anything, and you can preview it. My printers are not
that far away from the desk, so it's only a few extra steps for me.
We disabled the printer function on all student machines and instead
have them put their documents in a "all print" folder on the network
{centralized printing].
Librarians, aides and volunteer parents then take turns having
"print duty" from an administrative computer station. They preview it
for size (#pages) mostly. It cut our paper cost by a whooping 75%. We
have no discipline issues regarding printing. It may be a little
inconvenient--- but we put a positive spin on it by "thanking the
students for saving trees". Also, I get to know a lot of the students
by name and we have NO, I repeat NO inappropriate printing [i.e. the
entire book the Odyessy, March madness game roster, personal e-mails,
google maps, etc.] Because we saved so much paper, we now can offer
color (centralized ) printing for academic papers.
We've done this for 4 ears now with great success. We did coordinate
with our computer tech folks.
Good luck....Save a Tree!
We have two laser printers behind the circulation desk in the (high
school) library office. Students must come to the desk to pick up their
printing, and they are charged 5 cents per page. The print jobs have
the student name on them, so that if the student never comes to get his
printing, we just add the amount to his library obligation. We save a
lot of paper, but also because most of our subscription sites allow
students to send print jobs to their homes.
We are a high school of 500 kids. My students are careful and print
wisely. I started a few years ago telling everyone that their first
page everyday is free. Every subsequent page costs 5 cents. I know
each page costs about 70 cents each to print, but we aren't trying to
recover the expense, we are just trying to make the kids think before
they print.
If the kid doesn't have enough to buy the extra pages, he or she can use
other students' free pages. I just have to see the giver agree to give
his or her free page for the day. Signatures and say-so don't count.
Here are a couple of other points that have developed as this program
works better every year: I tell the kids that I will never chase after
anyone's nickles and dimes. I did not go to college and get two degrees
to be a copy policewoman and to collect nickles. If they print, they
find me and pay. If they don't, and I have to track them down, they not
print again as long as I remember their face.
I have student aides in the library, and part of their orientation each
semester is to tell them that they can give away their free pages as
often as they wish. Some kid needs a second page and the library
student aide is aware of it, he or she can say, "he can have my free
page." Just try to make sure that no one suspects they are giving away
more than one page a day.
Anything a student types himself is free--one copy.
Finally, when research time is upon me, I go to teaching our resources
and how to print them. Then I GRADE how they print. The teacher
records the grade as a daily grade. When I give a grade, the print job
is free. Most grades are 100s. Some go as low as 70. Kids like it for
the good daily grade. Teachers like it for the extra grade to record.
But, when I'm not grading, the print jobs go back to "first page free,
every other page 5 cents."
I hope you can use some of these ideas.
We were looking for one earlier this year, I found GoPrint and it looked
good, but our tech people vetoed it. It has gotten good reviews from
every school library person who responded to me.
We use Pcounter. LOVE IT!!!
You can set the amount for printing, then we give each student a set
amount of money and the program counts down from there.
It keeps track of everything they are printing. We can tell which
documents, websites they are printing from and the times. If they use
up all of their money, we can show them exactly where they went wrong.
If they have been on task and printing school work we can then give them
more money, or we can charge them if it is a bunch of junk. OR we can
say, oops I guess you are done.
I have the same problem and have requested that our IT department look
into using Print Limit Pro.
http://www.genevalogic.com/index.php?id=print-limit-usa
We use Print Manager Plus. It's around $500.
Papercut NG: www.papercut.biz/products
CZ Print release station 3.0
www.czsolutions.com/print-management/prs_knowledge.htm
Danville Fourie
Librarian
James Monroe High School
Fredericksburg, VA
Tel: 540- 372 1100; ext 2415
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