Paperless school
We all know the daunting and frustrating task of controlling the flood of printed matter – unsolicited post filling up letter-boxes, piles of newspapers and magazines pushing into every scrap of living space, letters, bills and bank statements silently cramming cabinets and drawers. Enough!
Teachers’ working spaces don’t seem to be spared from the avalanche of paper either. What makes it even worse is that they create so much clutter themselves. All those lesson plans, notes, hundreds of unreferenced photocopies, snippets and press cuttings kept in hope to be re-used one day. They seldom are. And the backlog of unsorted low-quality materials grows and threatens to clutter the mind as well. Enough! But how to stop the dominance of ineffectively used paper.
A solution has arrived. This month we are testing a beta version of DEVONthink Pro Office. It has been around for some time, but the latest incarnation finally makes teachers’ dreams come true.
This is just a small list of jobs DEVON does:
- Keeps an impressive range of text and other files in one database.
- Within the database it allows groups of files and links between them.
- Uses Artificial Intelligence to classify new documents added to the database.
- Searches the database in an instant.
- Runs its own web server and publishes the database as a searchable website on a local network or the Internet.
- Gives distant users the possibility to search for documents, view and download them. Simply speaking, it turns the database into a mini-Google.
