As I was working with second graders last week, I realized something important that needs to be shared with students when using the onscreen keyboard. In order for the keyboard to be displayed when you tap the little “ABC” or “123” in the Graffiti area, you must have a blinking cursor on the screen. Even though there may be a text field displayed, the onscreen keyboard won’t activate unless you tap in the field to get a blinking cursor. Some applications place the cursor in the fields for you, but others may require you to tap the field first. Just a quick tip for you!

Newszap.com community website has an article from Arizona. It's about Paradise Valley Unified School District and its use of palmOne handhelds and AlphaSmart Danas with students in first through seventh grades. 3,450 students in 115 classrooms are part of PVUSD’s program and they are hoping to expand it. Although there is not yet statistical data to prove the benefits of handhelds, PVUSD has “collected enough anecdotal evidence to prove the program works.” Click here to read the article.

There are many opportunities to learn about handheld computing this summer.

I’ll be at the National Education Computing Conference in Philadelphia July 27-30. There will be several sessions dealing with handhelds. I’ll be spending time at the GoKnow booth. I’ll blog specific dates and times soon. I hope if you’re going to be at NECC, you stop by to see me!

The Lexington One Handheld Conference is July 7 in Lexington, South Carolina. I’ll deliver a keynote address and present several sessions. Click here for more information. Update: New Conference Website!

The third annual SuccessLink Handheld Computer Conference is July 11 and 12 at the beautiful Tan-Tar-A Resort in Osage Beach, Missouri. I’ll be the keynote speaker and all break-out sessions will be hands-on! The deadline for registration is July 1, 2005.

The Mid-Atlantic Handheld Conference is July 18 in Salisbury, Maryland. I’ll be the kick-off speaker and do a few presentations all about handhelds. Check out the session descriptions. Register by June 1 and receive a free MAHC t-shirt!

The third annual technology integration conference, “Pathways to 21st Century Learning", is August 10 and 11 in Livonia, Michigan. I will be the keynote speaker on August 11 and present a couple of break out sessions, all about using technology to teach and learn. Registration deadline is August 1, 2005.

I’ve always said that attending a conference is one of the best ways to learn about new ways to use handhelds in education. It’s inspiring to be around other educators who are also using (or interested in using) handheld computing for teaching and learning. You should watch the 5-minute video with post-conference interviews from the Michigan Handheld Computers in Education Conference held on December 1, 2004. Educators say that the conference was definitely worth writing three days worth of sub plans. Of course, it’s summer, so most of us won’t need to worry about substitute teacher plans for the conferences listed above.

Kids love Mad Libs. Kids love handhelds. What do you get when you put them together? Gone Mad! It’s the newest freeware Palm application from Brian Schau.

Start using Gone Mad! by selecting a story template, which contains blanks for you to fill in. Enter words that fit the descriptions. The more creative you are, the crazier the finalized story will turn out. After filling in all of the blanks, the story will be displayed, containing the words you filled in.

Once they’re familiar with filling in the included sample story templates, students can begin to make their own. As they compose a story, students simply leave out key words and replace them with descriptions of the missing words. For example, “I wore a [adjective] shirt to the [event].” Each of the descriptors in brackets need to be uniquely named, otherwise the same word will be places in the same-named brackets.

Creating Gone Mad! templates is a fun activity that helps students understand parts of speech, subject-verb agreement, and much more. These are concepts that can be difficult to teach and learn. Through writing, testing, and revising their story templates, students learn about usage, grammar, and mechanics.

I have added a section to learninginhand all about Gone Mad! It’s where you can get more story templates. I’ll continue to add story templates that I create, but I also hope to add templates by teachers and students who submit them to me. Wouldn’t it be fun to end a unit of study on Ben Franklin with a Gone Mad! story?

Students will go mad for Gone Mad! Download it from www.schau.com/s/gonemad.

As summer break approaches, it’s time to think about what you will do with your school’s handheld computers.

You want to keep your handhelds secure over the long break, and you also want to keep applications and documents safe as well. Sure, you can lock up the handhelds for a couple of months in a cabinet, but the problem is most handhelds have volatile memory. That means that once the battery runs out completely, everything added to the handheld’s memory will be lost. [FYI: The only palmOne handhelds with nonvolatile memory is the Tungsten E2, Tungsten T5, Life Drive, and Treo 650.] When you charge and turn on the handhelds in the fall, the handhelds will only have the software that it had back when it was freshly taken out of its box.

There are several ways to deal with this issue.

First, you have to decide if you want to keep the same data on the handhelds for next school year. If so, then I suggest synchronizing each handheld to a desktop computer. When you return in the fall, you can simply synchronize the handhelds to restore all of the settings, applications, and documents. This is a good option if you have a shared set of handhelds with little or no student-specific data or if you’re having the same students next school year.

In most cases, however, you will not want all of the data from this school year on the handhelds next school year. That is, Ben’s handheld this year will be Judy’s next year. Judy doesn’t want all of Ben’s documents (and you don’t want her to have them). I suggest first beaming any cool student examples (like Sketchy animations, word processing documents, quizzes) to the “teacher” handheld. Be sure the “teacher” handheld has all of the software you wish to keep as well. Then you just need to keep the “teacher” handheld charged all summer (and don’t forget to synchronize it for good measure). When school resumes, you can beam the applications back to the handhelds. Plus, you have kept some really great examples to show your new students.

There are also commercial software options for backing up handhelds. For example, BackupBuddy from Blue Nomad Software can backup your Palm handheld’s files to a desktop computer or to an SD expansion card. It seems to me that by synchronizing (for free), you are already saving important data, so BackupBuddy (not free) may not be very useful. I do like that it backs up to an SD card. If your school is like mine, your desktop computers’ hard drives are wiped clean during the summer, which would delete your synchronization backup.

There's also Grant Street Software's SD Deploy. You can make a clone of one handheld and put it on an SD card. When school resumes, simply stick the card into a handheld and the applications, documents, and settings will be restored just as they were on the handheld before the break. This won't save individual student data for your whole set of handhelds, but most likely, you don't want that data on the handheld next year.

Each school’s handheld situation is different. Find a solution that works for you that keeps your handheld hardware, software, and selected documents safely stored for summer.

I should note that it’s not healthy for a handheld to have its battery completely drained. On rare occasions, I have not been able to resuscitate a handheld after being stored all summer. However, last summer I brought all of my school’s handhelds to my house and set up a bank of chargers. I would rotate them each day so that all handhelds would be on the charger each week. This was an enormous pain so I don’t recommend it. I’d rather deal with one or two dead handhelds than go through that again this summer!

Note: As a follow-up, I’ll be blogging about how to set up sets of handhelds for the school year in late July.

Brian Shau and I have put a lot of time into our newest piece of educational Palm freeware and now it's ready for you to download! Dictate is a tool to aid in dictation. A teacher creates a group of sentences and reads the sentences aloud to a class of students. Each student enters the sentences into his or her handheld. At the end of the dictation exercise, Dictate displays a score. Students then may view their answers and compare them with the correct answers. They can even export a complete report of the dictation session to Memos that can later be printed or beamed to the teacher. There’s also a companion Windows program called Diploma that will print out a certificate! Dictate doesn’t have to be used for just sentences. Teachers can dictate spelling words as well! Whether it’s sentences, words, or phrases, the best part is students get instant feedback (instead of waiting for their teacher to correct and return their dictation exercise).

Dictate is one application used by both teachers and students. First, in Teacher mode, you’ll need to add sentences into Dictate. Then you add sentences into a Group. The Group is beamed to students. In Student mode, learners can then enter the dictation into their handhelds while the teacher reads the sentences from his or her handheld. Download this User Guide PDF to help you begin using Dictate.

More information about Dictate can be found at www.schau.com/s/dictate.

One of the best newspaper articles about educational handheld use was published today in the Green Bay Press-Gazette. The article features Becky Lee’s fifth graders at Foxview Intermediate School in De Pere, Wisconsin. They have been using handhelds since the beginning of the school year. The article states, “The PDAs and small folding keyboards are kept in the classroom and students can quickly pull them off the chargers to create an instant computer lab.”

Becky has found ways to use their Tungsten E handhelds everyday and calls their integration into the curriculum as “surprisingly intuitive.”

The De Pere School Board also provided a high school business class with handhelds. However, that pilot was not successful because “the small screen size made writing longer research papers more difficult.” Interesting—handhelds are much more than word processors. Anyhow, those handhelds will be moved to Foxview next school year where they will be more helpful to students.

In addition to De Pere Fifth Graders Quick Studies with PDAs, there have been some great handhelds-in-education articles on the web lately. Check them out here.

Alex Bick is a 16-year old junior at Milburn High School in New Jersey. He has taken it upon himself (with help from higher education institutions) to answer the question, “Do Pocket PCs increase high school academic achievement?” Alex writes:

Several years ago, upon entering eighth grade, I was given a Microsoft iPaq Pocket PC for a birthday present. After using it for several months I noticed a distinct improvement in my grades. During the rest of the school year I noticed that the improved academic achievement continued. I wondered if my experience was a mere fluke or whether Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) in general, and Pocket PC devices in particular, could improve Millburn High School students' academic achievement. I knew that the only way to confirm or deny this observation was to conduct a controlled scientific experiment that would produce empirical evidence.

Alex’s scientific research concludes that there is a clear association between handheld usage and higher academic achievement. His online listing of his publications includes a recent article in Learning & Leading with Technology. He also has online slide show presentations highlighting his research. Alex’s conclusions can be used to convince school administration (or grant readers) of the value of handheld computers!

Alex is continuing his research into educational handheld computing. I plan to keep tabs on his website, as more scientific research will be posted.

My spring 2005 Handhelds in Teaching and Learning class has come to a close. I hope that you’ve had a chance to browse through the lesson plans and to read through the Class Log. The Class Log is written by a different graduate student each class session, and you’ll find photos, links, software, tips, tricks, and more!

Each graduate student kept a weblog and posted after each session of class. There’s lots of great sharing, thinking, and reflecting in these blogs. Lynn and Sue wrote great posts that contain interviews with teachers who are currently using handhelds. Learn from Rick’s experience of exchanging a handheld, Melissa’s school’s Tech Night, and Erika’s great software find. Oh, and look really carefully and you’ll find some great recipes from our delicious dinners.

Besides the blogs from my class, there have been some great posts in other places in the blogosphere. Back in January, Mr. Benn’s fifth graders at Inland Lakes Middle School in Indian River, Michigan posted about why they like handhelds. For example, Josh wrote some ways in which his handheld has been helpful:

Handhelds have helped me out a lot this year. With handhelds we can study a lot easier with Quizzler. Also we can stay a lot more organized with the programs Tasks and Calendar. We often take our handhelds home to use Quizzler to study for our tests. We can practice our typing with the wireless keyboards and a typing program called Words Per Minute.

You can certainly tell from their comments that students value their handhelds.

Also, the very friendly-looking Lynn Lary in Eugene, Oregon has been blogging about various Palm applications in her Handhelds in the Classroom blog. Lynn comments on the instructional value of software like BeSmart, TanFree, WordDraw, and more. She’s been updating it regularly, so check back often (or better yet, subscribe to the blog using Bloglines).

As you can see, there’s plenty of online reading material to keep you busy in the home-stretch of the school year!

Here are three new products for Palm Powered handhelds in schools:

Grant Street Software, the company that focuses on management solutions for handhelds, has a new product you can download and try. GSS HiHo – Classroom Edition allows teachers to easily retrieve Word To Go and Memo documents from a class of students in one folder location on a desktop computer. It also features a way for teachers to quickly distribute documents to handhelds through synchronizing. Unfortunately, Grant Street Software does not have a Macintosh version of HiHo, so I have not tried it myself. If you’re a Windows user, take the trial for a spin and decide if its $499 price tag is worth it.

Bachmann Software & Services announced in January their new product, FilePoint Classroom Edition. FilePoint allows users to access folders on a computer network. This means students can retrieve files or place files on a server computer. The price tag is $149 per classroom. However, you should have WiFi wireless capable handhelds, like the Tungsten C, Wireless Dana, or a handheld with an Enfora Wireless Portfolio. According to Bachmann’s website, FilePoint Classroom Education can also be used with Bluetooth and Infrared networking. Like GSS HiHo, FilePoint requires Windows, so I have not tested this product myself. If you’re interested, try emailing Bachmann for a trial to make sure FilePoint will work with your handhelds and your school network.

A product that does not require Windows is K12 Handhelds’ Integrating Handhelds Across the Curriculum. This is a bundle of classroom materials that includes two posters, a resource book, a CD-ROM, and an SD card with installable content. The resource book has great tips, how-tos, and lesson plans. The SD card contains Quizzer quizzes, Memos, and Plucker documents to support the lessons. The Plucker documents are hyperlinked eBooks, and K12 Handhelds has written some good ones, including a “Writers Style Guide for Students” and “Exploring the Planets.” Geared for grades 4-8, Integrating Handhelds Across the Curriculum is a useful resource and the price of $49.95 per classroom license is well worth it!