As a class's mountain of paper use increases, more trees disappear from the environment. Going green to save the environment starts in the classroom. Teachers can reduce paper use through creating a paperless or minimal paper classroom with the assistance of a variety of technology.

One of the greatest consumption of paper in the classroom involves the class textbook. The paper used in providing a three hundred-page textbook to one teachers' one-hundred-and-twenty-five students amounts to 37,500 sheets of paper. If there are thirty teachers in a building each with the equivalent text size and the same number of students, the result is 11,250,000 sheets of paper. As an alternative, a science teacher replaces his thick textbook with his own virtual textbook through a wiki  (online collaboration environments such as pbwiki). As he collects resources such as handouts or Web-based sites, he posts these resources to the wiki. He organizes the wiki much as his previous textbook; each section of the wiki corresponds to a major learning topic. He often has his students add additional resources. This wiki-based classroom text contains information tailored to the teacher and the students. Additional, the wiki contains up-to-date information as opposed to outdated textbooks. In a variation, some teachers take all of the class material, create a linked document, save it as a CD, and give the students a course CD.

In addition the teacher can replace a  handout which has only a small amount of writing, with a screen in PowerPoint that shows the same information to the students. Instead of an English teacher handing out a piece of paper with the class discussion prompt such as “Should people interfere with other people's dreams?” she displays it in a PowerPoint slide.

Likewise, students hand in “written” work in digital form. When science students write up their own original research experiment, they submit it digitally. If twenty five students in one science class expend three pages each or seventy sheets total, a teachers' students for five classes  (or twenty students times three times five classes)  consume three hundred and seventy pages for just one assignment. These electronic submissions do more than save paper.  Since students word process, their writing is legible.  In addition, the teacher can  easily cut and paste formative comments onto their papers before returning them. The instructors can collect all of the students' written material in one folder to be able to review the growth of the student.

Similarly, students can take forms, surveys, quizzes and tests online through BlackBoard or online services as Google Forms. Teacher save paper when they do not run off multiple page tests for each. For example, a social studies teacher has a seventy question multiple choice unit test that requires three pages per student; she gives about fifteen of these during the year. She wastes 16,875 pieces of paper in tests.  An additional benefit is that many online testing services  instantly correct the students' multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, or true-false answers. In a similar manner, the online survey programs  group all the students' answers for the same question together so the teacher can quickly analyze the results.

When teachers do have students print out papers in the class, they require that the students only print out the final version. Some students will print out many versions of the same document when each version only has minor changes. For instance, a middle school health science student reprints five versions of her four page healthy diet paper as she changes the font and font size for the headings. In a similar vein, if students are to write something out in class, they can use the unused space on a  previous piece of paper.  One teacher has the students write four different assignments on the same sheet of paper so that they only consume one piece of paper instead of four.

The Green Classroom starts with the teachers using technology to reduce paper consumption. When instructors use technology to replace paper, they drastically lessen the use of paper.  As teachers and pupils do things digitally, they save trees and the environment. Be Green, Go Digital!

Dr. Harry Grover Tuttle focuses on assessing and improving student learning through low- and high-tech tools.

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