Does #edtech *need* printing? (A mini rant)

**For this post, the generalizations (everyone, every teacher, etc) pertains to my province, as I don't have experience or first hand knowledge in how other Prov/State/Districts work **

In our digital age of every person in the education sector having access to, if not a dedicated, computer, why do we need printing? The ability to email between students and teachers, the availability of having "drop box" style sharing and submission, ability to set up portals/blogs/sites with "submit homework" buttons, all scream to me the utter and absolute answer.

When I was in school a mere 15ish years ago, the broken process involved putting pen to paper for at least 2 drafts before being allowed to type it and print. I thought this was loony back then, as I could merrily type away in whatever word processor package they had and it would help me with spelling as I went. Today this draft into final is the status quo for the most part, yet instead of then saving the file in a shared drop box, or even emailing the teacher when done, students still print and hand in hard copies, which teachers either give back after marking and the student disposes of, or the teachers themselves send to the bin. Not only wasteful, but unnecessary.

Current regulations apparently require hard copies of some administrative paperwork. For the most part, all these documents are already backed up multiple times with multiple methods. The only reason this does not meet the standards, is because when the standards were written, a computer could only play pong or go to the moon. (Thank you Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie for that) Even with the hard copies, there's nothing stopping that from being lost in a natural disaster or other kind of physical damage. And if there are redundant hard copies of these documents, not only is there more paper/toner being used, but also now double the physical space is required. Same goes for a teacher lugging multiple class sets of papers home. If they had the class put them in a drop box or email, then they only need to take their laptop home. If they had physical copies made, then they have to take around 25 1-5 or more page reports home for every class along with their laptop. Maybe it makes sense to the teachers, but it sure doesn't to me.

A couple of years ago, I set up a drop box for every teacher in my high and middle schools. Normal summer maintenance of the server removed them, and I only had a single teacher ask for it back. So far this school year I haven't had even a single teacher ask for a drop box set up.

Obviously I'm in the anti-printing camp. If I had a slate/tablet/pad type device, I wouldn't need to print anything for my job. I only have to print my list of cases so that as I'm doing work I can make notes when not at the computer. A slate device would remove that need. A 17" hunk of aluminum is a bit much to tote around for this task. At home I can't even remember the last thing I printer. The 3-in-1 I got with a laptop purchase has never had the ink put in, yet has been used quite frequently as a scanner.

I feel like maybe I'm ahead of my time, but hopefully I'm only about an hour and a half ahead ;)