An article on the Meeting News website describes how some professional conferences are replacing paper packets of information with handhelds loaded with the electronic versions of all documents. The PDAs are either given for free, or rented out for a small charge. You can read about it at http://www.meetingnews.com/ .
Most activities with handhelds use a low bandwidth form of wireless connectivity (IR). But now there are Radio Frequency (RF) add-ons that allow you to connect handhelds to a Wireless LAN (WLAN). When connected to a WLAN, students and teachers have uninterrupted Internet access as they move around campus with a PDA in hand.
Use of a large number of Palms in the classroom is causing some teachers to voice concern over how much energy they must put into keeping them charged up. Here are a few tips on extending the battery life of a Palm ?
1. Turn off the sound
2. Don?t use the back-light
3. Reduce the contrast for the screen
4. Limit game use
5. Set the Auto-Off in Preferences to 30 seconds
Just a short unrelated side note ? a good way to protect the Palms when they are being moved from one place to another is to place them in padded envelopes. These envelopes are not very expensive and they last a long time
If you want to use your Palm to make PowerPoint presentations, consider Cutting Edge’s new Quickpoint program. With it; you can view, edit and present PowerPoint shows. This software is part of Cutting Edge’s Quickoffice Pro suite.You can record PDA-annotated notes right onto PowerPoint slides. You can also zoom in and out on slides, as well as display them as thumbnails and four other slide-view modes. The price of Quickpoint is $30.00. You can get the entire suite for $50.00. The URL is www.mobilityelectronics.com. The phone number is 480.596.0061.
More from Conn:
Here’s some interesting info on wireless options for handhelds from the Consumer Electronics Show last week:
http://www.brighthand.com/article/CES_Wireless_Cards
http://www.brighthand.com/article/CES_SanDisk
And a few other odds and ends, including turning your handheld into an FM radio!
http://www.brighthand.com/article/CES_Jan9
Conn McQuinn passed this information along. I thought it might be of interest to handheld enthusiasts.
Conn says:
The article referenced below, while being mainly focused on wireless networking, has several interesting sections on wireless handhelds with technologies I hadn’t heard of.
Check out the article on wireless technologies in education “Cutting the Cord: Wireless Computing Comes of Age ” published by CoSN (Consortium for School Networking). This article is part of a new print publication of CoSN which will soon be released called the CoSN Compendium. This article, the second article in a suite of eight, is currently openly available in the public area of the CoSN website http://www.cosn.org/. I thought you might enjoy reading this material that is now published on the public area and look for the new articles as they become available. The wireless article will be replaced by an article on Data Driven Decision-making soon called “No More Flying Blind: Using Data-Driven Decision-Making to Guide Student Learning”.
If you wish to comment on items that were created in previous months, go to the particular article and click on the time the item was created. This moves you to a screen that allows you to enter a response. I am looking for responses from all posted items relating to the use of handhelds in education. Please do look at items posted in previous months and make comments.
There is a new publication out, Vol. 1 in 2002, called the handheld educator. I have a special advertising section with two lessons included. The first one is on using DataViz Sheet To Go in a grade 4-6 math lesson and the second is on using DataViz Word to Go in a grades 7-12 language arts lesson. If you would like a copy, just say so in a reply and I will get one to you. Act quickly while supplies last.
I have provided a document listing 15 Palm programs. These have been around for awhile. There are more coming out weekly. There are now a total of over 22,000 programs that run under the Palm OS. Many are free. Keep coming back to this Weblog and you will be continuously provided with information about new programs that run on Palm OS devices.
Evaluation studies are showing that handheld computers can offer unique benefits to teachers and students. Students can have a personal, portable device ready at-hand for individual and collaborative learning activities, whereever they go. Students can use handhelds for such things as collecting data in the field, learning vocabulary words while waiting to be picked up after basketball practice, or to self quiz during a long car ride. Teachers are finding handhelds to be effective instructional tools. It appears as if teachers feel handhelds are more easily used in the “flow of classroom activities” than desktop computers.
If you are using or are thinking of using handhelds to support your personal or your student’s life-long learning goals, I suggest coming back often to read materials presented in this weblog thread.