Unnecessary printing

[synaesthesia]

In fact it's wonderfully flexible and helps promote good practice - i.e. can stop you from printing if it has a "default name" like document1.doc untitled.xls etc - forces people to save. It's not all about saving trees! Helps (forcibly) teach people to make proper use of a computer instead of treating them like typewriters. We have it set up also (which is common) to stop people printing the same thing more than 3 times, if they need that, go to reprographics!

Plus the scripting side of it is so powerful there's little you can't make it do with a bit of creativity. I will echo though, make sure you have the backing of SLT. If they need persuading, show them the last years printing costs.

[Dickens]

We use Print Manager Plus here and all students are allocated £5 per term (£5 per old full term so £15 per year) and staff double that. If the students print more than this we give them more credit and recharge it back to their parents. Teachers overspend comes out of their departmental budget. All colour printers are setup with 2 queues one for B&W and one for colour with B&W being the default printer. We then have all of the SMT and some office staff on unlimited printing, but they are mostly reasonable about what they print. On the whole it works well, and we don't get too much wasted printing and little moaning from staff or students as the system has been in place for a couple of years now. We charge 5p and 15p per A4 sheet - i'd be interested to know how this compares to others who implement print restrictions.

 

Witch - was the option to disable repeat printing for 1 minute in PMP - I'd not seen that in our version but will be going to have a look for it now !

[nyiss]

I took out the printers from all the classrooms except the nursery and IT suite and put signs on the remaining ones requesting to print no more than two copies of any document whilst I figured out which option to go for with our printing management. complete suprise to me printing reduced by 80% and anything over a couple of pages staff always come and check if its ok to print....its been about a year and its stayed the same I am still in shock, never did put anything in place.