The high school students in Orland, Illinois are engaged in an exciting technology pilot program. The Consolidated High School District 230 made use of handheld computers. These devices were bought by the district, then sold and leased to students for use throughout their classrooms. The district also provided these handheld computers to all students who could not afford to purchase one. The handhelds are small enough to hold in one hand and they provide a one to one technology ratio between teachers and each student. The computers have been used for fitness and nutrition to compute fitness goals that measure nutritional intake and physical activity. In Biology classes students compute ecological footprints in relation to the ecosystem. English classes use handhleds to create journal entries. Earth Science students use the computers to measure the speed of sound by measuring strikes of lightening and claps of thunder. I found this to be an innovative way of connecting education and technology.
My search for a technology article lead me to
http://www.education-world.com/a_tech/tech083.shtml
Education World led me to this interesting article at http://pdaed.com/features/district230.xml
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5 comments:
Audre,
Those handhelds are pretty cool. I've often wondered what it would be like to give all the students computers they can use. I think we were talking about in class how it could revolutionize something like writing if students were sending their writing to teachers, editing through the computer, etc.
However, that being said. I think there is something to be able to write by hand also. There is a student writing journal called Stone Soup which is pretty great. However, students are not allowed to submit entries via email. Stone Soup feels that if a student is truly interested in getting their work published, they can write it by hand. While I'm not totally sure I agree with that one, there is a loss of personality when you are always just using the computer.
More to come...
Audre,
The other thing I was thinking about was the back and forth that technology companies go through. Although it seems like every few months, there is a new gadget out, frequently, the gadgets need to change based on the users. Like it said in that Education World article, the glass screens of the Palm Pilots are breaking in the students' bookbags, so the company is going to make plastic ones. The more the technology comes out, the more we realize what we need it for. I'm not sure that is the correct way to create technology, but it seems like that's how it's done.
Hi Audre,
Thanks for sharing these ideas and the good article. This does a nice job of highlighting some of the uses of handhelds in the classroom. There is so much potential to make technology ubiquitous when we think about handhelds!
Palm has a whole website dedicated just to palms in the classroom http://www.palm.com/us/education/
THere is also some cool stuff on Concord's site:http://www.concord.org/work/themes/handhelds.html
Even Apple with the iPod and new iPhone could be considered a handheld with educational applications.
Imagine you won a grant to purchase a handheld for each of your students....what would you do???
Have fun!
CMB
Audre, is this something you have the technology to try? I used a Handspring for a year or so myself, and found it cumbersome to write stuff into it. However, here in our county, all K-2 teachers have one to enter reading data, which they then upload to their desktop computers. Then all the data goes to central office where the K-2 literacy person can see the data on any child in the district.
I am sure kids would find "texting" into it more fun than writing in a spiral bound notebook, though!!
I can see many great uses for handheld computers. I don't think they could replace the time students spend on the actual computers but how wonderful it would be to use for science for students entering data. Also, I can imaging that there are many math lessons that would be enhanced by the use of a hand held. I'm not familiar with all of the software avaibable but I'd love to experiment with one and see all of its capabitities. Are there programs where the student can enter an answer to a teacher-given question and you can see the class answers?
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