Matt Villasana's fourth graders in Missouri write about what goes on each day in their classroom. Students use their handhelds to write and submit their work for S4 News. As the end of the year appraches, Matt is recognizing good writing by conducting the Villitzer Awards. Four of the best posts in S4 News reports have been selected. Now Matt and his students need your help! Please visit this page, read the four finalists' entries, and send in your vote. I'd suggest even sending along a few comments for Matt's students about their writing. If you're a classroom teacher, consider having your students read each of these entries. You could even use FlingIt to send the webpages to their handhelds. Sounds like a great writing lesson to me!

My graduate students in Handhelds in Teaching and Learning have put together 11 wonderful lesson plans for a variety of grade levels and content areas. These lessons use handhelds and include all of the digital files you might need, including PowerPoint slide shows, Quizzler quizzes, eBooks for eReader, and handouts:

Angles in Art

Color Theory & Using Layers

Comparison of Multicultural Literature

Dinosaur Daze

Face It!

Fun with the Food Guide Pyramid

Meet the Instruments of the Orchestra

Note Names & Piano Games

Research, Production, and Presentation of Abstract & Pop Art

Reference Resources: Being a Good Detective

The Important Things About Nouns

These lessons were presented to the class on Thursday, April 21. Click here to read the Roving Reporter's account of each lesson presented!

I'm proud to report that three of this year's Sketchy Contest winners are from my own Willowdale Elementary School. Three handheld-using fifth graders from Willowdale have made educational animations on their handhelds that were judged to be the best of the best!

GoKnow's contest has five categories: Social Studies, Math, Science, Language Arts, and Other. Each category has a K-6 Division and 7-12 Divsion. Visit the Sketchy Animation Contest page to view more than 30 terrific animations. Send your students on over to this page so they can learn from these examples. I bet they'll pick up a few tips and techniques to use in their next animations.

You might be familiar with the useful counter program PTally by Jennifer Hodgdon. Another great piece of Palm freeware Jennifer offers is PPick. PPick is a random number generator where you can select an upper and lower limit and choose to generate up to 10 numbers at a time.

Jennifer’s brand new freeware application is called PSpiro, which is a Spirograph/Lissajous polar plotting program for Palm OS. PSpiro is most appropriate for high school students taking trigonometry. I’ve forgotten most of my high school trig, but it’s fun to see how manipulating the numbers changes the graph.

Check out all of Jennifer’s software offerings at www.poplarware.com.

I used handhelds with kindergarteners for the first time last week. To be honest, I was kind of dreading the experience. I thought the five and six year olds would have a difficult time for various reasons. I figured their fine motor skills were not ready for the precise tapping required on our Tungsten Es. I also thought they would get completely lost and I would spend most of my time just getting the little folks to launch one application.

After reading the article, Are Handhelds Pedagogically Feasible for Young Children?, I became more excited. The article concluded that kindergarteners can learn some important technology concepts from handhelds. My lessons consisted of introducing the handhelds and how to care for them. I then showed how to launch Note Pad. The students did really well. I’d say the most difficult part of the lesson was getting the stylus out of the silo. But, my other fears were unfounded; the kindergarteners launched Note Pad and really enjoyed drawing spring pictures. I also had them write out some words they have learned to spell. And lastly, I asked students to draw a picture of me. In fact, click here to see some of the drawings (in case you don’t know what I look like).

I think every student in the class rushed home after school to ask for a handheld for their birthdays!

I can’t wait to take my class set of handhelds back into kindergarten! I want to teach other curriculum concepts in addition to technology. There’s very few applications for primary children, so it will take some creativity to find ways to meet curricular objectives.

Podcasting is certainly catching on with the public, and a new survey proves it. The Pew Internet and American Life Project estimates that more than 6 million people are listening to podcasts, which is a technology developed in just the last year. Like blogging, podcasting’s growth will continue to affect those of us in education. Not only is it a medium students should know about, but it’s a way to bring rich (and free) audio content to our students. Also, students will be creating their own podcasts, whether it is at school or on their own at home. From my experience at Willowdale Elemementary, producing podcasts is a very educational and worthwhile endeavor. In fact, listen to Willowcast #2, all about space!

I blogged about Delmar Elementary’s wonderful school website in January. Patti Weeg, computer teacher at the Maryland school, continues to update the site Palms: a HANDy Way to Learn. Now you can read how Delmar third graders are using handhelds to connect to online friends in Peru! After students typed letters in FreeWrite, the teachers synchronized the handhelds and copied and pasted the students’ letters into emails to teachers in Peru. Read the letters here. Patti tells me that Delmar is also in the planning stages of connecting with a class in South Africa. Indeed, one-to-one computing and the World Wide Web is a powerful combination!

Brian Schau continues to work with me on bringing software from my Palm OS Wish List to life! Two new applications are available to help students with fractions.

Simplify presents students with fractions to reduce. You can set the size of the denominator and Simplify keeps score.

MixedUp helps students convert fractions to mixed numbers and mixed numbers to fractions. You can set the quiz type and denominator size. Also, you can select a beginner level where students are given parts of the answers. Like Simplify, a score is kept that can be reset at any time.

There are a variety of ways to have fun with programs that keep score like Simplify and Mixed Up. Read my blog post about using MathCard in fun ways.

Students at Willowdale have really enjoyed (and more importantly, learned from) using Angles, Simplify, and MixedUp. While students practice, they receive instant feedback! Brian generously makes these applications available as freeware. If you use these programs, please send him an email and let him know how much his time and talents are appreciated!