School Giving Students Handhelds
Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005Sorry about the (ahem) slight gap in postings…
A private school in Illinois is giving Palm Zire 72 handhelds and keyboards to all their 4th through 8th grade students. The school ran an initial pilot and was pleased enough with the results to roll the project out across all their older grades.
This is counter to the trend we are seeing around here, though. Interest in classroom handhelds has definitely dropped off. I think a large part of it is that they are still a pain to roll out systemically. Issues around syncing and managing are can still be difficult to handle, and most district IT departments are stretched already. Most seem deeply unenthusiastic about adding handhelds to their support inventory.
In some of the classrooms we support, the teachers have had similar experiences at the building level. Some of our teachers love using the handhelds we’ve made available to them, but many find that the support overhead to use them is more than they want to deal with.