Printing: The Saga of the Past Six Weeks and Even Bigger Questions to Ponder

In recent months, staff members have received various communications regarding concerns about student printing, with particular mention of the library. Since the messages have been provided without comprehensive context and often indirectly passed along in "telephone game" style, I hope to more clearly outline some of the issues. As we have been experiencing a high volume of printing with the end of the grading period coming up, the topic is fresh in my mind.

Starting with the bottom line... READ THIS if nothing else

As you may not be interested in reading the entire saga, I will start with my most important points:

1. Printing Volume: Students print in the library a lot. As of 1/21/16, the black and white cloud printer had served 12,291 print jobs. Keep in mind that a single print job may be multiple pages, and this is often the case.
2. Printing Woes: The print volume was manageable until the past six weeks when we started experiencing major printing drama, as detailed in the saga below. At various points recently, I have grown weary and worn, and I apologize if you have in any way been on the receiving end of my grumpiness! As I approached our admin team for support, some bigger questions have been raised about why there is so much printing going on, how we may utilize Chromebooks to reduce the need for printing, and even more fundamental questions about expectations for student responsibility and accountability.
3. Reducing Printing: As someone who strives to protect our environment and would love to free up school funds to be spent on other educational purposes, I encourage the use of technology to reduce the volume of printing when there is an appropriate alternative. I offer my partnership to anyone out there who would like to find ways to digitize lessons, explore management tools such as Google Classroom, or experiment with new projects and types of student work products. At the same time, I think it is important to acknowledge that we are only a little more than a semester into our school's 1:1 implementation, and transition can take time. If you decide next month or next semester that you want to try something new, my door is always open to you!
4. In Support of Printing: Based on research, I do not propose a 100% paperless environment - I support purposeful printing. I am also a proponent of balanced approaches and believe that it is important to consider the particular needs of different circumstances and individuals. As an aside, an interesting scholar who addresses related topics is Maryanne Wolf. Her book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain is in our library collection - remember, staff may check out books, too!
5. Mindful Printing: My only request is mindfulness regarding printing. What needs to be printed and why? Is there an alternative, and what are the pros and cons of this other option? What support do you need to pursue a potential alternative, and how may we as a community best support one another?

And now for more information than you might ever want to know about printing in the library...

What exactly is the library printing policy?

Students are welcome to print in the library with the following considerations:

• Black and white printing of school work is free. Other black and white printing is $0.10 per page.
• Color printing costs $0.25 per page, although the color printer recently broke and so this is not an option until a new printer is purchased with library department funds.
• The printer should not be used for copying services. Teachers may instead facilitate copying via front office duplicating. 
• Students should keep in mind that library printers do not always function dependably - see more about this below.

Why are students printing so much?

As much as I hope to minimize printing taking away from my curriculum-related teacher librarian responsibilities, I understand that students have legitimate needs to print, and I also believe that students do not always have options to print elsewhere. For this reason, I have advocated that students have access to print on campus, and I support the library being a central place that facilitates printing.

Regarding the legitimacy of printing, I can attest that students only print academic-related material ~99% of the time. Also, while there has been a lot of attention about the printing of essays, it is important to recognize that students print much more than just essays. 

Sample types of printing:

• Class work to turn in (e.g., essays, reports, and other projects)
• Handouts, worksheets, study guides, and practice tests posted online that were previously distributed via duplication services
• SAT and ACT tickets
• College and scholarship application related materials, including transcripts, letters of recommendation, etc.
• Job search materials such as resumes and cover letters
• Athletic clearance forms, physical forms, and grades for coaches

Our students are fortunate to have a great amount of technology at their fingertips, both at school and at home. This is why I don't end up with 200 of a teacher's students printing in the library when an assignment is due. Having said that, it is important to recognize that there are students who do not have printers at home or cannot afford to buy toner when it runs out - plus procrastinators - and so there may easily be 50 students printing from just that one teacher.

When everything functions smoothly, how does printing work in the library?

Students print from their Chromebooks using Google Cloud Print as follows:

• Since the current library printers are not cloud-enabled, staff desktop computers are used as print servers with printers shared via a staff Google account.
• Every single student must manually add the cloud printer as an option by navigating to a link and clicking on a button to add the printer. Once added, a student does not need to repeat this step. But, since cloud printers are added per Google account, students who use multiple Google accounts must add the printer to each account separately.
• Each time a student prints, after having added the cloud printer, it is necessary to not only select the option to print, but to change the printing destination (which is often confusing for students) before the option to print is enabled.

There has been a learning curve with cloud printing (i.e., most students need one-on-one assistance to add a cloud printer), but it is manageable...when it works.

NOTE: Most teachers have the ability to set up cloud printing in a similar way if they have a working printer. To see if this is an option for you, connect with Tech Specialist Jovan.

The Saga: What has jammed (pun intended) printing in the library?

• Google Cloud Printing Issues: After working smoothly for a year and half, with the shortened URL to add the cloud printer having been clicked 2,559 times (Remember: this means the cloud printer was added to 2,559 separate Google accounts!), the cloud printer stopped working consistently at the end of the fall semester, right when a lot of work was due. Jovan helped troubleshoot the issue, which included trying the following: (1) creating a new cloud printer, which meant every student had to add a cloud printer for the second time, (2) changing the dedicated cloud print server workstation to a different computer and different Google account, and (3) creating a new cloud printer yet again, which meant every student had to add a cloud printer for a third time.
• Unpinpointable Print Queue Issues: After seemingly resolving the Google Cloud printing issues, there were then a couple of weeks when we suffered from puzzling print queue issues. This, unfortunately, happened to coincide with some major paper deadlines from multiple teachers. The Google Cloud print queue would get jammed, and we would have to manually click individually on stalled print jobs in Google to cancel them. The local print queues would also get stuck, and so we would have to manually cancel each of those jobs via the host operating system, too. We would get error messages on the physical printer and would have to restart the printer, which would take a couple of minutes each time, and all the while, students would be lined up anxiously hoping that their papers would print so that they could receive credit for their assignments. To tackle these issues, I was fortunate to have a village of helpers including Jovan, our site substitute Eric, and all of our library and technology student aides, plus other kind library regulars. It was all hands on deck, and we tried the following: (1) setting up an old printer as a second option, which unfortunately hasn't worked well since it was retired for a reason; (2) having students share or email documents for me to print them locally, which mostly worked except that my name is difficult to spell and if students had already turned in work via Google Classroom, they had to be instructed on how to make a copy to share instead - not to mention my email inbox filling up with documents to print; and (3) setting up iMac workstations to allow for local printing, which interestingly and frustratingly shed light on how students lack an understanding of the difference between local and cloud storage and printing (e.g., they would log out of the iMac rather than logging out of their Google account).

• Hardware Issues: The main library printer is about eight years old, and it is not a high capacity printer. We have been getting frequent printer jams, particularly when there are a number of students printing at the same time. Un-jamming involves the typical routine of taking out the toner and checking various and sundry doors, as I'm sure most of you have experienced. The good news is that the school will be purchasing the library a new black and white printer, and so this will soon be one less obstacle.
• Miscellaneous Issues: In addition to the above issues, there have also been miscellaneous
  roadblocks such as the DDoS network attacks that have affected everyone, as well as random things such as all three of my staplers breaking this morning. This caused quite a bit of panic since students understand that the expectation is that papers must not only be printed on time, but must be stapled and ready to turn in. Thank you to Debbie for supplying us with emergency backup staplers and to Eric for being my legs to pick them up!

Congratulations! You have reached the end of this saga! While I don't want to jinx myself, the "Google Cloud Printing Issues" and "Unpinpointable Print Queue Issues" were non-issues for most of this week. We don't know what magically changed (although it is quite possibly due to troubleshooting by our brilliant "Nerd Herd" tech helper students), but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the previous weeks amounted to just a random bad run. Also, if you got lost in the laundry list of technical mishaps, don't forget to review the "bottom line" points with "even bigger questions to ponder" at the start of this post.

*Adding this in honor of all the English classes that have been studying Hamlet lately. Of course, of even greater significance is the question of why or why not?