What About the Handhelds?

Okay, this blog is titled Handheld Reality Year 1 and there hasn't been much mentioned about handhelds. All our work with classroom webpages coincided with us meeting and investigating the concept of having handhelds in our classrooms. Our principal, and team member, has been a Palm OS user for quite a while. She has a Zire 71 and uses it on a daily basis to keep track of her appointments, set reminders, take pictures, and document workshops and trainings she attends utilizing Documents to Go.

I began to utilize the iPaq I received at NECC for the same things. I liked a lot of the features, especially the way I could "tell" it what my writing was like. The iPaq allowed me to view various ways letters are formed by hand and choose which were similar to the way I write. This was so much easier than having to learn and remember grafitti strokes that were needed for my Sony Clie when I wanted to input text. My iPaq literally became attached to my hip, at least it's case was always hooked to my belt loop and was easily accessible.

When the team met about the webpages, we continued to express an interest in getting handhelds into the hands of students at our school. We felt the concept was cost effective and would enable students to have more options in class. Even with our mobile computer labs, it wasn't possible for all students in one classroom to be working independently on a laptop. There were only 15 in each cart and that always left some students without a computer, even utilizing the desktop models in the classroom.

The big question our team kept asking was, "Which type of handheld do we choose? Palm OS or Pocket PC?" Two of our team members had been utilizing Palm OS handhelds throughout the past year. They both noticed a major issue that caused concern if we placed the Palms in the hands of our students. Both of them had experienced data loss on their handhelds, not only on the handheld itself, but on the memory cards they installed. If their Palm's battery completely discharged, it would dump the memory on the handheld and the memory card. All their items were lost! Yes, they knew all about synching their handhelds, but the fact that the data was completely DUMPED on a battery's discharge was frightening.

For this reason, and the fact that we had all been introduced to Pocket PC's through ISTE, we began our research. One issue I was concerned with was students' keyboarding skills. We didn't have a computer class in place at our school, although we did have a full computer lab for student use. When I used the laptops in my classroom for writing activities, students took quite a long period of time using the "hunt and peck" method when typing. This had the potential to become a larger issue when handhelds were incorporated, especially if we wanted to utilize them in place of pencil and paper tasks.

Our research led us from wireless keyboards to thumbboards. These are small keyboards which attach to the bottom of a handheld and allow text input by utilizing the user's thumbs. Knowing that the thumb is "THE" digit of our video game generation of students, we felt that purchasing Pocket PC's with thumbboards would be the way to go.

In addition to our personal experiences, we contacted speakers we had listened to at NECC about their experiences with handhelds. For the most part, we found that many who had begun by using Palm, began to switch over to Pocket PC's for various reasons. We never got definitive answers from people as to which they would recommend for a startup program like we were designing.

Palm OS has been around for a long time and the majority of programs were written specifically for their systems. Many of the freeware and shareware programs were also for Palm, although Pocket PC's were starting to build an impressive library of programs too.

Our principal began compiling a proposal to present to our school district in order to fund the project. When she plans, she plans BIG! I guess she figures it doesn't hurt to go for everything you can dream of using. In addition to the handhelds, the proposal included a projector, a Margi, digital cameras for the handhelds, a laptop computer, and many other items. We were traveling yet another path that would lead to change.

Be The Willow

The hurricanes and their interruption of the school year finally ended and things began to return to normal. Okay, as normal as a school year could be after starting three different times. Due to the storms, our original plan of getting teachers up and running wasn't going to be met in time for us to join ISTE at the new conference in October 2004.

The district had to make decisions, because we lost so many school days. One method of making up time was to only utilize one Wednesday each month as an Early Release Day. This destroyed our original time line of using our Professional Learning days for teachers to learn how to create and update their own classroom webpages.

Alot can be said for Turtles who follow the FISH Philosophy! The least of which is that we don't give up. We persevere and work with what we're given in order to succeed in our endeavors. Although we wouldn't be able to reach our goal by October, that didn't stop us. It just allowed us to "be the willow" and adjust to the winds that blew around us.

Our members had various roles and duties to perform in order for us to succeed with our webpage plan. It started with contacting district personnel about our plan and getting approval. To our surprise, we learned that the district had a program which would allow us to create individual webpages for faculty members. Communications flew and we got excited! We were ready to roll and even had a conference calls with a representative for the portal system we were going to utilize. We sat through an interactive training session with the representative. It was quite a sight to see the four team members huddled around our principal's desk, communicating through her speaker phone, and interacting with the representative online with some of our iBooks.

Weeks passed, we organized more, and were getting closer to the time when we would be able to invite teachers to begin their webpage journey. We set up a final conference call with the portal representative and even invited one of our district people to join us. We felt that this would allow us to have someone local who could help us troubleshoot if needed.

Unfortunately, that meeting didn't go as planned. We didn't end it with a date to start working with our teachers. It actually ended with us returning to GO and not being able to collect our $200. After all our weeks of planning, and conferencing with the portal's representative, it ended with us hearing the following words to a question we posed, "No, you won't be able to do that with the portal." This came as quite a shock to us and the district person that sat in with us. He was just as surprised as us, because it now seemed that this program would not allow the district to do as they had originally planned.

Thus, we "became the willow" yet again. The wind blew us enough that we were able to return our sights to our original plan for the webpages. Use whatever was available that we could find. Make it simple and easy for us to use.