TECHNO GEEK Add a rocket to writing in your school

This month I thought it would be interesting to look at a great alternative solution to traditional writing exercise books that schools invest thousands of pounds in every year. Many schools still purchase at least six different writing books for each child to use in the classroom, many of which aren’t fully-used by the end of the year; this isn’t a great use of money and creates lots of wastepaper.

Rocketbooks have been around now for a number of years and have started to transform the way schoolwork is completed by pupils and then recorded and assessed by teachers. The ability to make environmental savings on the reduced use of writing books by issuing pupils their own reusable Rocketbook has had amazing results. 1:1 devices, such as iPad or Chromebook, still offer far more additional creative options for pupils; however, even if schools cannot afford to move towards a 1:1 roll out of devices, they could afford to deploy 1:1 Rocketbooks and ensure that each teacher has a device with the Rocketbook app installed on it.

HOW DOES THE ROCKETBOOK WORK?

The Rockbook App connects the various symbol links to the storage services that teachers use - all of the most popular services are there ready to use. You then simply write in the Rocketbook as you would in any writing book and, once done, you highlight the correct symbol at the bottom of the page to allow the app to send the work to the correct location. to Google Classroom! Collaborate on exciting new lessons the old-fashioned way…by hand! Then scan, submit, and organise in one location. variety of different ways to make this change. The most popular option is the Rocketbook Core Letter (8.5” x 11”) which has 32 pages that can be simply wiped clean ready for reuse. The only downside that I can see is that you have to use the special Pilot Frixion Erasable Rollerball pens which you can probably buy at great bulk prices from your usual stationery supplier. The general feedback is that the quality of the pages, along with the ease of use in quickly wiping them clean, is very positive.

There’s also the option for a school to order large quantities of Rocketbooks, complete with the school branding, to offer an all-round quality workbook would be approximately £12,500 (£25 per book). These also all come with a single pen and microfiber wipe.

To work out value for money, we now have to compare this to the cost per child of the many books for writing they have each year. Using 50p as an average cost per book, based on average Yorkshire Purchasing Organisation pricing, multiplied by six books and six years from Years 1-to-6, this works out at a total cost of £18 per child for their time from Year 1 to 6. Looking at this basic example there isn’t an obvious monetary cost saving but, in practice, even if the monetary cost is similar then there’s a serious need to consider the option of moving to Rocketbook as an alternative in order to achieve a greener solution.

There’s also another fantastic product that Rocketbook provides now called Beacons. These little corner markers are great to pop onto a whiteboard or flipchart; once they’re scanned they take all of the information from the board and store it in a location of your choice to be used or organised at a later date.

I hope that’s given you all some food for thought.