Lexington One School District
July 6, 2005
Lexington, South Carolina
learninginhand.com/notes

Workshop Description: Handhelds are a great tool to teach concepts in every curriculum area! Tony demonstrates samples activities for state capitals, math problem solving, parts of speech, and planets. Within these lessons, teachers will use wonderful freeware applications that teachers can use to teach many more activities than the samples ones presented.

Photo Essay

Taylor's Day
Click for the entire text of the essay. There are hyperlinks to each application used.
learninginhand.com/articles/photoessay.html

States & Capitals

Interactive U.S. Map
Students use Visit It's interactive map of the United States to learn about regions. The map also lists all of the 50 states by two-letter abbreviation, state capitals, land area, latitude and longitude, and more. There's also a place to record your own information about each state.
www.freewarepalm.com/hobbies/visitit.shtml

Postal Abbreviations
Create a group of abbreviations for students to practice spelling in Spell It. To practice abbreviations, the abbreviation goes in the Word field. To practice spelling the state, you'd put the state name in the Word field. Students can create their own groups or have a group beamed to them.
www.freewarepalm.com/educational/spellitbystephen.shtml

State Sort
Get students to think about the region each state is in by piling all of the states on top of each other in Idea Pad. Beam this document to each student. Instruct students to drag the shapes around to sort the words into regions. Students can check their answers using Visit It.
Idea Pad: www.palmgear.com

Web Sites
Find great web pages and sites for students read on their handhelds. A good place to start searching is FactMonster.com, Wikipedia, and Yahooligans.com.

You then may choose to use either of the free applications FlingIt or Plucker. You will need to install the software on your Mac or Windows computer first. Both of these programs have documentation you can read to help you install and use the software.

FlingIt is made specially for education. An icon appears in your web browser that allows you to send the currently open page to your handheld through a USB cord. You don't actually perform a HotSync operation. Connect your handheld and desktop and then launch FlingIt and tap the Download Site button. Once the page is loaded on your handheld, it can be beamed and read to other handhelds using FlingIt. Download the FlingIt user guide from the link below for help.
www. goknow.com/Products/FlingIt

Plucker has more options and is more complicated than FlingIt. Once you find a page you would like to transfer to your handheld, copy the web address. Open the Plucker application on your desktop computer. Click the button to add a new "channel." Paste the address and complete the information, including the link depth. If you want just the page you are viewing to be sent to your handheld, you need to specify a link dept of one. Click the Update Channel button to have Plucker prepare the page. After the next time you synchronize your handheld, the new web page or site will be available for viewing and beaming on your handheld using the Palm Plucker application.
www.plkr.org/dl

Quizzing
Students can take quizzes that the teacher has downloaded from the web or quizzes the teacher has created herself. Even better, students can create they own quizzes to share with each other!
Download Quizzler: www.quizzlerpro.com/downloads.html
Download U.S. State Capitals quiz: www.quizzlerpro.com/quiz/ed/State_Capitals_Quiz.pdb
Free Quizzler Library: www.quizzlerpro.com/quizlibrary.html
Download Quiz-Making Instructions: learninginhand.com/articles/MakeQuizzlers.pdf

Sample Lesson: Adding & Thinking

Addition Facts
Students practice their addition "fact power" using the free flashcard program TimerMathFacts. See how many addition problems students can answer in two minutes. Do this several times to get students to instantly recall these facts.
www.freewarepalm.com/educational/timermathfacts.shtml

Hexplode
Introduce students to the two-player strategy game Hexplode. The object of the game is to take over all of your opponent's hexagons by building up your own. Once the number on a hexagon is equal to the number of sides of that hexagon that touches another hexagon, it explodes. All touching hexagons are now turned to the player's color and have 1 more number added to them. Because of this, most players win by causing a "chain reaction" of exploding hexagons to take over the game board. Be sure to use Hexplode's Help menu for all of the game's rules.
www.palmblvd.com/software/pc/Hexplode-2001-3-5-palm-pc.html

Summing
The "fact power" students got from TimerMathFacts combined with the strategic thinking from Hexplode are both needed to play Summing. Summing is a one-player game. The object is to clear the screen of all tiles. You clear the screen by placing the next tile in a blank spot. If a tile is placed in a position where the number on that tile is equal to the digit in the one's place of the sum of all tiles that are touching it, all of those tiles are cleared from the screen. (Touching includes sharing a side or corner.) Summing is very challenging! The current lowest score ever reported to Tony is 18.
www.freewarepalm.com/games/summing.shtml

Parts of Speech

Reference
It's handy to have reference materials on the handheld! References can come in many forms, like eReader and Word To Go. The easiest way for a teacher to put reference content on handhelds is to use Memos! It's a good idea for students to categorize reference documents so they can easily find them.

Memorizing Parts of Speech
Students memorize lists of information, like prepositions, by playing a game called "Cross-Talk" with a partner. The game uses Beamer, a free application that allows students to beam words back and forth. Start with Player 1 inputting a preposition and tapping the Beam button. Then Player 2 inputs a different preposition under Player 1's word and beams the document back to Player 1. Play continues back and forth until one player cannot think of another word to write, repeats a word that has already been used, or uses an incorrect word. "Cross-Talk" can be played with a variety of topics from the teacher, including synonyms and antonyms.
www.freewarepalm.com/communication/beamer.shtml

Silly Flip-Book Sentences
Using Silly Sentences, students input nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositional phrases. When the "Make Sentence" button is tapped, the words are mixed together into crazy sentences. Be sure to use the help menus for information about the parts of speech and which forms of nouns and verbs work best. Tip: Don't let students tap the "Make Sentence" button until there is at least one entry in each category, otherwise the handheld will crash.
www.freewarepalm.com/educational/sillysentences.shtml

Mad Libs
Fill in templates in Gone Mad! to make crazy stories. Students can make their own templates by taking a paragraph and replacing keywords with a description of the kind of word in brackets. These story templates can be beamed to others to complete and enjoy.
Download Gone Mad!: www.schau.com/s/gonemad
Help, tips, ideas, and templates for Gone Mad!: learninginhand.com/GoneMad

Planets

Space Weight & Age
Using the information in the eBook "Planetary Quick Guide," students use Sheets To Go to create a spreadsheet that calculates the weight and age of objects if they were in the gravity and have the orbit of other planets.
Download eReader: www.ereader.com/product/detail/15002

Planet Poetry
Students use information from the eBook "Planetary Quick Guide" to write poems about planets in Word To Go. To revise, have students trade handhelds. Students mark selections of the poem that are hot red. They mark sections that could use some work (cool), blue. When the author of the poems gets his or her handheld back, they know where to focus their revising efforts.

Cartoons
Using Sketchy, students can easily create animations about one of the planets. Again, students could use information from "Planetary Quick Guide" and from other sources of information.
Some Sketchy examples:learninginhand.com/articles/sketchy.html
More Sketchy examples: goknow.com/sketchycontest
Download Sketchy and User Guide: goknow.com/Products/Sketchy

Handheld Computing Resources

Tony's Website
learninginhand.com

Handhelds for Teachers & Administrators
by Janet Caughlin and Tony Vincent
www.tomsnyder.com/Products/product.asp?SKU=JANHAN

Teaching Now! "Handhelds in Omaha" Video
teachingnow.org/watchTV.php?id=32

Tony's Email
learninginhand@mac.com