>Our kids' teachers want them to print out assignments, fill them in, and upload pictures of the completed work to Google Classroom.
Why the hell are such ludicrously byzantine solutions being employed in the first place? What happened to the dream of the paperless office?
We're sitting here having pointless discussions about the feasibility of open source printers when we should be discussing the creation of better options to avoid the need to print stuff.
Kids shouldn't be printing assignment sheets and then photographing them and uploading the photo's, that completely idiotic. The should be able to download it, fill it in, and re-upload it.
These are things we should really be discussing. We don't need better printers, we need better solutions to printing. Then we can wave goodbye to HP and the like and watch them suffocate to death under the weight of their own greed and incompetence.
The status quo - like in the classroom - is to still just use ___________'s and whitespace on printouts. Some teachers even print the students completed work, just because "grading is easier that way" (read: they're unaware that computer based solutions for this problem exist, or they're not very computer savvy to begin with.).
Science and math classes are a different ball game. A HS chem teacher I know wants to use all the fancy modern teaching, assignment, and grading tools, but the district disallows it. Since the student's work involves drawing chemical structures, stoichiometry , and "showing your work" it's far easier to just have students print, handwrite, and scan/photograph their work than to persuade the district to buy software to perform the task. However, several students have been using iPads and drawing tablets to avoid printing and scanning, and a few overachievers use their own science/math drawing/graphing software, even LaTeX, to produce actual graphics and formatted equations.
I can imagine the same is true for math classes, where it's a huge PITA to properly format algebra, long division tables, etc on computers without expensive proprietary software (that includes MS office!).
Most educational institutions get MS Office for free (or very cheap), and the math support in something like Word is surprisingly good. It's not available in the (free) online version though (just checked now).
Not that I think a pure paperless world isn't a great goal, but that outlook seems a little naive.
My 1st grade kid is working on handwriting, drawing, art projects, and other "pencil work". Being in a hybrid model, at home we need to do the print-work-photograph-upload dance every day. I think even if we get the rest of our life down to 0.001% paperless, there's always going to be something that needs a printer...
Do you understand the benefits of drawing by hand on paper? I think you are smart and educated. Please, do your research properly, if not for you for the benefit of your kid. There are tons of research on this subject.
I have a wall covered floor to ceiling with paper and canvas of her art: oil, acrylics, watercolor, pencil, and probably some I'm forgetting. Don't worry about my daughter, she gets ten hours a week of private art instruction.
That's unrelated to her fifth-grade art class, though. During a pandemic, it seems wise that her school is mostly eschewing requiring paper, and especially not counting on every student's home having a printer.
Why the hell are such ludicrously byzantine solutions being employed in the first place? What happened to the dream of the paperless office?
We're sitting here having pointless discussions about the feasibility of open source printers when we should be discussing the creation of better options to avoid the need to print stuff.
Kids shouldn't be printing assignment sheets and then photographing them and uploading the photo's, that completely idiotic. The should be able to download it, fill it in, and re-upload it.
These are things we should really be discussing. We don't need better printers, we need better solutions to printing. Then we can wave goodbye to HP and the like and watch them suffocate to death under the weight of their own greed and incompetence.
IMHO