IT and Printing

Think about using a smartphone or tablet to project hand out sheets rather than printing them.

Invest in a ‘Smart’ Whiteboard

Teachers and students can write, erase, move objects and control applications using a finger or a pen. And with the 480, delivering dynamic lessons is easy.  Teachers can present material featuring large, vibrant images. Kinesthetic and visual learners benefit from interacting with lesson content moving letters, numbers, words and pictures with their fingers. And students with special needs benefit by being able to see, read and manipulate information more easily.

They can also be supplied SMART Notebook collaborative learning software, which helps teachers create, deliver and manage high-impact interactive lesson activities.

When printing a document, ensure you have extended the margins and where possible reduce font size, both these 2 things reduce the amount of ink and paper used. Reducing the font can remove excess pages, for example a document printed in font Times New Roman, size 12 covers 6 pages; if you reduce your font size to 10, the same document now covers 5 pages, when coupled with

Margin Size Reduction:  a word document that is 25 pages on normal margins’ (‘Normal’ is the pre-set margin size within Word) can be reduced by 4 pages just switching to the pre-set margin of ‘Narrow’ – you do this in the print settings – see picture below.  Or you can do it the ‘Layout’ tab within a word document

Use the double-sided printing option to reduce paper consumption

Remember to check how many pages your document is and consider whether you need to print it all, it’s a simple task whilst printing a document to select specific pages only to be printed. This is especially important when printing emails, as often the final page of an email is the signature and legal bumf… which you don’t need to print!

Review your software licences, for example Microsoft Office. There are lots of different licence types within the Microsoft office suite, from email only to a full office suite. Do you have users who have multiple inboxes, due to website customer service etc. Do you have the customer service email address using a full office suite licence, if so switch it to an email only option, usually for around a 3rd of the price. For example one school had 12 Office Premium licences, but they only had 6 users of Office the rest were email only accounts, so they were paying £9.40/user/month = £112.80; they switched off 6 of the premium and replaced them with Exchange Online (Plan 1) @ £3.00/user/month = £18. So they saved £38.40/month, giving a annual saving of £460.80