I have grave concerns here as the key factor is the organizational ability or understanding of the individual and their personality. Most "disorganized" students suffer from lack of structural design for processing as evident by their random piles of papers or whatever. To move from the concrete "paper" to the abstract "digital" will only add to the issue unless they develop appropriate file handling techniques, as it will now become invisable.
It doesn't matter whether it is a manila file folder for paper or a digital folder for scanned pdf's, the issue is the same from an organzing process.
That is what is needed and required as a habit to ensure they increase their succesful retrevial of information.
I hate paper. Not just because it’s usually made of dead trees, but also because I lose it. It ends up crumpled at the bottom of my bag, in a pile on my desk (or whatever flat surface happens to be near me), recycled, or used as fuel to crank up the fireplace on a chilly day. Plenty of people will disagree, but for my ADD-ridden brain, it’s a worthless anachronism.
Two of my kids are the same way. I could open my own recycling plant with the sheer volume of paper that spews out of their backpacks, binders, and books. Another of my kids is a worse piler and pack rat than I am, struggling to find space for his laptop among piles of forgotten papers.
Sometimes these papers are actually important. This is a pretty frequent conversation in our house:
Kid #2 or 3 (it doesn’t matter - the conversation is the same, although Kid #2 will tend to throw in a few more expletives): Hey, Dad, can you help me with this essay?
Me: Sure…Do you have the prompt?
Kid#2 or 3: Uhh, prompt? Errr…
Me: How about a rubric? So we know what the teacher is looking for in this paper.
Kid#2 or 3: I think I left that at school.
Me: Well, is it online?
Kid#2 or 3: No, Mrs. Dinosaurus doesn’t know how to post assignments on the Internet.
Me: OK, well tell me what you remember about the essay question.
Kid#2 or 3: It was about this story we had to read. It was in a packet. But I’m not sure where the packet is.
I can’t come down on them too hard since anything that isn’t in my phone, on my computer, or in my Google Apps accounts simply ceases to exist. I let my wife do that since she lives by her paper planner and is the single most organized person I’ve ever met.
Absent a type A, Luddite wife to keep you organized, though, is there a solution for our digital native students stuck in a paper world? As a matter of fact, there is.
Portable, personal scanners are nothing new. I’ve seen plenty of lawyers pull them out of their laptop bags and the last mortgage I closed saw all of my signed documents turned digital, one painful page at a time on a portable scanner. However, the Neat Receipts scanner from the Neat Company is a little bit different. It’s not generally marketed towards education and, as its name suggests, is meant to carried by your average road warrior to scan expense receipts, business cards, and other related documents.
Neat contacted me about a month ago and asked what I thought of the device for the education market. I had a feeling that it would be particularly useful in a few different use cases (Kids #2 and 3, for example), but I was glad to get a hold of the Mac version of the Neat Receipts scanner and put it through its paces for a few weeks.
