District Buys 1,000 Palms for Elementary Students
The Rio Grande Consolidated Independent School District (I’m glad I don’t have to put that on my business card) has made a serious commitment to the use of Palms at the elementary school level. With the purchase of 1,000 new handhelds, they have a total of 2,700 Palms being used in the second through fifth grades. As described in this article at the Brighthand website, the handhelds are used for both student work and for an assessment system called Tango from Liberty Solutions that is matched to the state’s standards. The system allows teachers to collect observations, examples of student work, even photographs (taken with the handhelds, of course). Data and reports generated are available to the superintendent whenever the teacher or student handhelds have been uploaded.
The article gives some fairly extensive coverage to the district’s implementation and what their goals are. It sounds like a pretty well thought-out approach, and not a simple “our kids need to use technology” program.