Bits & Pieces
Wednesday, September 7, 2005 at 8:50PM 
Sixth grade teacher Jason Jaffe at Mill Creek Elementary School in Warrington, Pennsylvania has a new website. Check out the Handheld Computing section to learn about how he and his students use Palm Tungsten Es.
Katie Morrow in O'Neill, Nebraska has a new website called Handling Handhelds. The O'Neill Public Schools are using handhelds to provide ubiquitous access to computing for their students. The site is designed for a graduate class Katie teaches. Check out and subscribe to the Handling Handhelds Blog to follow along with their journey.
Memory cards are handy for storing large files like photos, audio, and video for your handheld. Memory expansion cards are gaining more and more capacity and speed while their prices are declining. You can get a 512 megabyte SD card for less than $30. A one-gigabyte SD card can be found for less than $50. Make sure that the SD card you choose is compatible with your Palm handheld. See Palm.com's Support Knowledge Library to learn about the maximum size expansion card your handheld can use.
Technology & Learning Magazine's School Site of the Month for August is WillowWeb. WillowWeb, coincidentally, is the website for my school, Willowdale Elementary, in Omaha, Nebraska. The students and teachers at Willowdale are proud because we take a lot of pride in what we publish online. Technology & Learning is a free publication. Sign up online to receive free issues!
Wendy Gallagher has written an article for TechLearning.com titled Putting Reading Assessment and Achievement in the Palm of Your Hand. She explains Running Records and how mClass Reading software for grades K-3 allows teachers to use handhelds to complete individual reading assessments with children.
The September 2005 Learning & Leading with Technology magazine has two great articles about handheld computing. You can access this PDF. The second page of the PDF (page 26 of the actual magazine) begins the article "Beam Me Up! Using Handhelds with Elementary Students" by Mark van't Hooft and Karen McClain. Page 36 of September's Learning & Leading with Technology has an article by Robert Kadel with the agreeable title "The Time is Right to Embrace PDAs in the Classroom." Robert makes so many great points for using handhelds, however, his article is only available to ISTE members.
Up to 1200 Best Buy gift cards valued at $2500 each will be awarded to schools across the United States that are within 50 miles of a Best Buy store. Best Buy's Teach program will award schools that "expand or enhance existing programs that use the school's available technology to make learning fun for kids." Applications are due September 30, 2005.
Grant Street Software's SD Deploy is now available for Windows Mobile devices. Deploy is incredibly useful and time-saving if you are setting up multiple handhelds.
There have been some great suggestions and comments added to August 30th's blog post Second Graders?. Scroll down to the bottom to read them. As always, please post your own comments on any blog entry.
Reader Comments (1)
Congratulations on earning School Site of the Month!
Jason jaffe