iPad Printing

When we updated the printers and printing program at CCS over the summer, a new feature that was available was printing from iPads.  Since one of our main goals was to use mobile devices to REDUCE printing, we did not enable or publicize this feature.

However, many of our students and staff have been clever enough to discover a "loophole" that was left in place to make it easier for Mac users to print, and this loophole has allowed some people to print from their iPads.  My observation is that people who have been printing from their iPads have been pretty responsible and it has not been a large volume, and I actually commend those of you who figured out how to do it.

While it is convenient to be able to print from your mobile device, as a 1-1 district we rely entirely too much on printing and we must all work together to reduce this expense.  While our "loophole" is still open, it will be shut in a few weeks, and we will continue to work with everyone in helping them to find alternatives to paper printouts.  We also do not officially support printing from iPads (unless you get specific permission from your building principal).

We know that you will still have printing needs, we just want to encourage everything to think of and use alternatives when possible. Here are some suggestions which will help avoid printing, or if you must have a printout, to make it easier for the student:

1. Use eBackpack for assignment submission and grade the work online.  You can actually mark assignments on your computer or iPad and turn them back to the student without ever printing.
2. Have the students save their documents in google drive and share them with you.  You can easily add comments to google docs.  You could even create a folder in your google drive and share it with students so they can save their work to this location.  This can get complicated since you have many students and classes, which is really why we pay for eBackpack to automate this.
3. Ask the student to email the work to you (the teacher) and print it for them if you must have a printout.
4. Students can log into a computer in the lab or library and open files from either eBackpack or google drive and print from the computer.

If we could all cut our printing in half, we would save the district nearly $20,000 per year, and would be helping the environment at the same time!

Thanks for your cooperation!

Mr. E