This hit is quite long but with excellent suggestions. I think I
successfully copied and pasted all of the replies. It is quite long but
worthwhile.
Thank you for all of the good ideas. I will be working on this in the new
year.
Original Post:
Dear Colleagues,
I am looking for some good ideas to reduce the amount of printing and the
amount of unclaimed print jobs on my library printers.
Here's my situation: 30 desktop computers, 4 printers and 1200 students.
Students just print, not knowing where they are printing to. As a result,
they print again and we end up with many unclaimed print jobs. We have
increased our signage and are working on a plan to raise their
consciousness and
educate them.I spoke at a faculty meeting and sent an e-mail to the
entire
staff.
Teacher assignments are part of the problem: lengthy study guides posted
on
the Internet, lots of poster making with color photos etc.
We do not have the staff to centralize print commands and have kids come
pick them up nor do we have enough staff to collect fees from the
students.
Thanks in advance for any good ideas. I can post a hit.
Amy Ipp
Millburn Middle School
Millburn NJ
_LU83@aol.com_ (mailto:LU83@aol.com)
Responses:
We have the same problem, on a smaller scale. We have not solved it yet,
and you are trying some of the same things I have tried.
--Printers located at or near front desk, students must ask before
printing (or ask before printing more than X number of pages.) Works OK with
younger students, not so well with older ones.
--I know of schools that charge per page. We have considered letting them
have X number of "free" print pages each semester (would have to figure
out how to keep track in an automated way) and then charge after 50 pages per
semester (or whatever number.)
--Students do not unsupervised have access to color printer anymore. If a
teacher needs them to print in color, that teacher can supervise it at one
of our few color printers, or students can make them from home. One of
the art rooms has a color printer, and the art teacher deals with it.
--If review sheets are left in the printer, and I can tell who (or which
department) they belong to, I put them in the teacher box with a note "left
in printer." Although it doesn't show which student printed, At least it
shows the teacher that this waste is going on. There have been times when
I've left 2 or 3 sets of Spark Notes or biology review notes in teacher
boxes.
This year, I put in a request that next time the library gets new printers
they be able to default to double sided. Two new printers will be put in
this summer, and they will default to double sided.
I think that will be the biggest help.
Good luck to you. I'd love to hear what other suggestions people send.
Many of our middle school teachers have students put their assignments on
their google documents. The teacher set up a google email page for them.
There are other ways of doing that now. google email not as easy to set up
now, but there are other ways of doing that now.
We have only used one toner cartridge this year, so it has imporved
considerable from two years ago.
We share your pain! One thing that we have going for us (one student
printer, 800+ students) is that the print jobs come out with a "watermark" with
the student's name and a code for grade level (each student has a
county-issued laptop). This makes it possible for them to be sorted. We have a
sorter (one of those long strips with a divider for each letter) for each
grade level and a couple of times a day, student aides sort the pile of
unclaimed papers. Each teacher also has an electronic "drop box" for assignments,
although that hasn't seemed to reduce the amount of printing. On Monday,
I cleaned out the 6th grade unclaimed papers from November and it was well
over a ream of paper. Some of the schools in the county have restrictions
on printing, but we haven't been able to push that through in our school
yet.
I'd love to implement this at my school, but I have been butting heads on
this topic with the tech person since my first day (which was this school
year). Since I have a small school (450 students), I'm able to tell the
students as they're in the library's computer lab to minimize print and to ONLY
print if REQUIRED to turn in for an assignment. They can always email
articles and online source information to themselves or Delicious or Diigo it
(online bookmarking).
I loved GSLIS at U of Illinois.
1) They named all of their printers, on the network (visible in the
Print window) and on the printer itself. If you print to Spartacus, you go
directly to Spartacus. If you print to Chip, you go to Chip. If you needed
to print in color, it went to Dale.
2) There was also a quota locked into each student's login to allow for
only a certain number of prints per school year and pay beyond their quota
usage.
There are 2 problems of doing this in my school.
1) There are two computer labs, only one is attached to the library.
The printer in each lab is practically the same name (Lexmark...). If I
could get the tech person to label the printers on the network as "Business
Lexmark" or "Library Lexmark", we wouldn't have this issue. Or... if the
business lab only had access to its printer and the library only had access to
its printer.
2) Students consistenlty forget their own login and use the generic
username and password. Not to mention that the tech person doesn't want to
tackle this issue.
This is going to sound simplistic, so I apologize in advance But:
Have you considered simply not offering printing as a
service--considered shutting off and/or removing your printer(s)? That's
what I did. And I've never regretted it. Plus, I really don't get any
pushback on the issue.
Proclaiming my library GREEN, I simply stopped offering printing a few
years ago and have never regretted it. The ability to print stuff, I
realized, is not a skill I care to impart. It's not really a skill at
all. A pigeon could easily be trained to print stuff. In fact, most
often, at least in my middle school, printing was just a way to bypass
or forestall thought, effort, and learning. It's an ecologically
wasteful and educationally counterproductive thing to do. Plus--and this
will sound severe--I consider any teacher that creates an assignment
culminating in an assessment that's largely just an APPROPRIATED
assemblage of printed out material to be a pretty poor teacher indeed.
(walk down the hallways of most American schools and you'll likely see
dozens of the dreaded "poster projects" on display, most full color
testaments to the complete mastery of a lone learning objective:
"student will be able to successfully initiate a print command."
My kids have all pretty much knocked that 21st century skill out of the
park by the time they reach middle school, so why re-teach?
Now: What about the printing of an original digital product? Certainly,
that's a different dealie. Got me there. The thing is, we're set up NOT
to be a general purpose computer lab by design. Being mission-centered
is great for instruction and, among many other benefits, it keeps your
facility from becoming a mindless paper mill/print shop. That, as I see
it, is what our computer labs are for. We have about 35 workstations on
our library floor and they're used exclusively as research kiosks. When
students want to make a document portable, they either use the e-mail
bots built into all our databases or, if using a standard publicly
available web site, for example, they're able to use Google docs as
their note-taking/linking/cuttie-pastie medium. That takes covers nearly
all the bases and fells a lot less trees. Once in a great while there'll
be a compelling need to print, like when a computerless student has been
absent and is trying to scramble to smash and grab an armload of stuff
to take home and digest. On those rare occasions, we make it happen.
Yeah, printing... I remember the bad old days; it's like recalling an
addiction: Endlessly feeding those beasts ream after ream...the
well-meaning kids who'd walk up to me beaming with a two inch thick
stack of what used to be pristine Canadian flora in their hands...(ugh,
I shudder)...and they'd say things like
"Look, Mr. Hastings! I got all this! I got tons of it!"
And I'd feel the punch of shame in my gut 'cause I knew that all they
really "got" was a pile of wasted pulp. I always knew it. I'd know it
'cause, almost without fail, I'd find, if I just looked at the printout
and asked a few questions, that the amount printed was inversely
proportionate to the amount learned.
Damn you Epson! Curse you, Lexmark!
Over a decade ago, Dr. Jane Healy visited schools to see how technology
was being applied. She then wrote about it in her book "Failure to
Connect." Teachers, she discovered, "often mistake downloading for
thought." Ten years hence, I still think she was right, and it's the
same deal with printing. I just decided to quit participating in that
masquerade. Cold turkey.
One last anecdote:
I'm old enough to have introduced digital resources to my building.
(Yikes.) I remember back in the day making a CD-ROM atlas program
available on an old PS2 that was connected to a printer. Back then a
social studies teacher routinely would come in to have kids do the
research for a standard geography "poster project," with map, flag and
stats. Back then, kids hand drew their maps as a matter of course,
graphologically experiencing the contours of borders and landforms,
labeling oceans and rivers, and cities and mountain ranges.
When students started printing out their maps instead, he didn't blink
an eye. Soon, I was aghast, as if I'd created an education-eating
monster, but he seemed delighted. The maps were so much neater and
uniform, after all. He quickly began instructing his students: "Make
sure to print your map!" So, kids would patiently queue up at the PS2
for a long wait, call up their map, and print it off so that they could
paste it to their poster. Achievement went way up; every map was
perfect, and every student a well-trained pigeon.
When money become tight last year, the school didn’t order paper for a
couple of weeks. We recycled those extra copies by printing on the other
side. Teachers started accepting work on those recycled pages. We also taught
the students to copy and paste for notes plus change the margins to .5
before printing.
When we did have paper, I just didn’t fill the printers. I would delete
all print jobs before adding paper. I told the students I didn’t have much
paper and it was for final copy only. Some students brought their own
paper, but then the printers started running out of toner.
This year, the teachers are being encouraged to have a “paperless”
classroom. We’ve had in-services for this. I haven’t had as many students
coming to the library to print. I also send them to the teacher to print.
It’s been while in changing the expectations of students and teachers. I
still don’t put much paper in the printer. This year in the new library
facility, I asked that printers NOT be installed on the lab computers.
Sneaky!
Money—lack of—has changed people’s. It’s a powerful motivator for
principals.
Our solution? Charge for printing. We charge ten cents per page, unless
it is work they type themselves (lab reports, essays, etc.) Cutting and
pasting does not qualify as typed yourself, and if there are pictures, there
is always a charge. Some of the other high schools charge for everything
run through their printers, but we are in a high povery area, and so pay
for student work. When I came here 7 years ago, this system was in place, and
I was appalled. However, it turns out to be very workable, and I became a
convert. We maintain a cash drawer which isn't that hard to do. All
this eliminates the downloading pages and pages of garbage, but still allows
for kids who have no access to a printer at home. At several of Salem's other
high schools, kids are given a printing allowance which is administered
electronically. When its used up, too bad. We do have one color printer
attached to our circulation computor, but not to the student machines. For 50
cents per page, we will print incolor from a disc or flash drive. Ink
cartridges are now running $41.00 apiece, and the kids do understand why we are
charging. It might take you awhile to convert, but believe me it works, and
is really very little trouble. Oh, I forgot to say, the printer is behind
the circulation desk , where kids are not allowed, which allows us to look
at what is printed.
I've been mulling this over in my mind, and I don't see how just saying no
to printing meets student's needs. Being green is well and good, but is
it in your district's educational goals? How does this further students'
academic success?
It may work as far as simplifying the librarian's load, and making an
environmental statement, but student's have diverse research assignments, and,
they also come from different economic backgrounds. Not all students have
the ability to sit in front of a computer the entire time they are working
on an assignment. It's not always possible for a library to have unlimited
books on every subject so that all students can check out books for their
topic. They also have different learning styles, and some students
actually need to have a printed copy of materials in hand to process the
information successfully. The point is not that anyone can push the print button;
the important thing is that students are able to get the educational
information they need in a format that they can use to learn and succeed. One
size doesn't fit every student, and I think we have to be more adaptable and
make sure we are providing access to the information they need in a variety
of formats and teaching them how to use that information correctly and
ethically.
One of the things we work on is helping students make decisions about what
is the best source of information. All too often, students turn to Google
because it's fast and easy. They end up using sources like Wikipedia or
Ask.com when they can get much better information from the databases we
provide. We use a different approach. If students choose to use Wikipedia or
other generic online sites, they get 5 pages free, and then we charge for
each additional page. If they use one of the databases we provide, I don't
charge them to print at all. I want them to learn to distinguish between
good, scholarly information, and the stuff that a random Google search
provides. Searching Gale Group online requires them to stop and think and learn
new search techniques that they will use in college. To encourage them to
do this, we offer the incentive of not charging them to print these
articles.
It works well for us, but it may not be the solution for other libraries.
You could get your tech people to segregate the printers - one that all
30 library computers print to, one (in a more secure location) for
faculty use, and a couple for print jobs that come from other places.
If you can put all of the public printers together that would help some,
too, and perhaps eliminate the issue altogether. Kids would still have
to look at several printers, but if they are lined up in a row that
shouldn't be too hard.
Here is what I did when I was a middle school librarian (2 years ago):
1. I trained my students (yes, I re-taught constantly) to NEVER print
from the Internet. The rationale was that I was saving them money (I still
use this with high school students). I have them read the info on the
computer screen & copy & paste only the information they need onto a Word doc.
They can manipulate font size & margins that way. I charge 10 cents per
page & have only one printer (then & Now) in the library. Students print &
then come to the circ desk to pick up their pages.
2. At the middle school level, I created a print card on cover stock with
25 numbers on it. Each semester, students could request a new card (we
made a notation on their record when they received a card) and 25 pages of
free printing. After that, they could purchase another card for $1.00 or pay
10 cents a page for each page they printed. I explained about the card
every chance I got. The first year was confusing, but by the second year,
students knew to ask for their free card or to purchase a second card. Very
few printed from the Internet (mostly new to my school students, who had not
heard my spiel). I was able to do this because my principal gave me a
generous budget that easily paid for the paper & toner we used. I would never
"just say no" because, although students could print for free in the
computer labs, they could not use them unless they were in with a class.
Therefore, we were the only place in the building where students could print a
last minute project, etc. It is a service for our students that I think is
necessary & appropriate. Before I left (and here at the high school), a few
students were e-mailing their papers to me to print for them & they would
just stop by in the a.m. & pay for / pickup their copies on the way to
class. I gladly did this to support them & their teachers.
There's lots more I could say, but you get the idea. I vote for finding
ways to support the students & structuring them (creating policies) that
make it easier for you to do so. The middle school was 1500 students, staffed
with me & 1 aide. The high school is 2500 students with 2 librarians & 1
aide.
Hope this helps.
Here at St. John's International School in Belgium, we have a printing
system called FollowMe. Everyone in the school has a four digit print code.
When someone gives a followme print command, they can go to any followme
printer, put in their code, and have their job printed. Students are
allocated a certain number of pages per month (for seniors doing IB it is 50).
Right now faculty have no limit on printing or copying. If students need
more, they have to ask the IT coordinator. It works well for us. We have one
followme printer in the library and there are 2 others available for
student use. The FollowMe printer can also copy, but we have not enabled that
function for students.
Here is a link for one vendor site: _http://www.ringdale.com/FollowMe/_
(http://www.ringdale.com/FollowMe/) You can find more by googling
followme printing.
We are high school of 2900 students. This was a huge problem for us,
but purchased CZ Print Station (print manager). Makes all the
difference in the world. We realease print jobs from one master
station. We set it to not allow printing over a certain number of
pages. If the student never requests to have their job released, we
just delete it. We can release it just once if they send it multiple
times. The master station is the media clerk's computer, so she manages
most of that.
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