Going Green and Digital with Rocketbook and Donors Choose by Chase Fenner
Last school year towards the end of the year I was given a Rocketbook Wave notebook by a colleague as a thank you for helping them. I instantly fell in love with it and went to work. As an educator, I used it to create digital copies of every anchor chart I use throughout the year and cataloged all of my lessons for my team.
As the new school year started I wondered why more people were not using an amazing product like this so I worked on getting every staff member on campus their own Rocketbook notebook, but by that time the Core was out and we upgraded to it.
I also thought about how I could use this in the classroom with my students. We do a lot of projects where students usually use 3M poster paper to display work. I thought it would be amazing to have students create a poster, scan it, and then display it digitally instead. I went to work using Donors Choose and Rocketbook supported us even further by donating to our school so we could get a set of 8 notebooks for each classroom.
We loved what we were able to do with it so much that we decided we would try and get class sets so that students would be able to do work individually instead of only as a group. We went through Donors Choose again and time after time Rocketbook supported our school and donated to help us. Now we currently have a class set for all reading/writing teachers in the 4th and 5th grade and use them daily to create lessons, posters, etc.
One of the biggest sources that we have found the most useful were the printed PDF pages. Since we are teaching writing we really needed lined pages for the students but we needed to scan them in as writing samples so future teachers can see work samples. These printable PDF pages were the perfect tool for this use and our teachers now use the PDF pages to collect and make digital copies of writing samples for the whole student body.
Since we have started using Rocketbook notebooks, we have drastically reduced paper that we are using. The only thing that is holding us back from going even further is that most of our students do not have their own electronic devices to access their work after it is done so we still rely on hard copies and an interactive notebook for some of our work. That mostly comes with the age group that I teach and I only wish I had known about this when I taught junior high and every student was 1 to 1 with an electronic device.
Our school is truly blessed to have the support from Rocketbook and Donors Choose that allowed us to accomplish so much and change our classrooms so drastically in such a short period of time.
