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The
day was cloudy, gray, and gloomy. One of
those days you just want to stay home and curl up with a good book. The
type of day that seems endless; the gloom creeping deeper and deeper
into your soul until you feel it’s about to consume your entire
being...
Luckily, I didn’t have to worry about that because it was Thursday,
and after a three week pause in my academic studies, I was headed to
my handheld class. To the lay person it may seem that I live quite
a lackluster type of lifestyle. Really! What kind of person looks forward
to extending their day into the night for a graduate class? You
might think I’m some kind of crazy person who would voluntarily
subject teenagers to tortures beyond the realm of any normal person’s
imagination. --- Okay! Well, I am a Middle School math teacher. But
that’s beside the point. The truth is I’m
always excited about the new things Tony is going to show us each week. Handhelds
in the classroom is just totally “da Bomb” to quote some
of my students.
As I walked into the classroom and looked on the chalkboard I saw that the “To
Do” list was shorter than normal. Would this be a short night for
us? It wasn’t long before Tony announced that tonight was probably
the one night that we would be getting out of class early. Of course he
emphasized the word probably. Before class started Janet showed all of
us her new portable
keyboard. It’s an infrared type. I’ve included
a picture of it with this report.
We started off by turning in the printouts of our Quizzler questions about handhelds
and having a quick discussion about Fling
It, which is used to save and view
web pages on the small screens of handhelds. Tony explained that the best
pages to use are those that are formatted to be viewed on handhelds or those
with a substantial amount of text on them. He showed us how any pictures
found on a web page that did not have a format that would work with Fling it
would be grouped together before any of the text was displayed. He showed
us examples of good and not so good web pages to capture.
Next, I was put on the hot seat. Since I was unable to attend the last
class session when everybody shared the Sketchy they had created, I had to step
out on my own and share my Sketchy. I wished I had been able to see my
classmate’s sketchy to see if I even came close to doing a comparable job.
Anyway, after that Tony presented a PowerPoint that explained the ins and outs
of downloading handheld applications to our computers. We learned about
the two file formats these applications are available in, the .prc and .pdp. We
also went through the steps of “hotsyncing” applications to our handhelds. I
think the most important point Tony made in this discussion was that you need
to always check the system requirements of an application before you try to sync
on to your handheld. If you don’t have enough memory or the correct
version of the operation system needed you may run into problems. You may
even end up freezing your handheld to the point where a hard reset is the only
fix.
Before we knew it, it was time for dinner. We had a wonderful dinner of
stuffed shells, salad, and dessert presented to us courtesy of Lu and Rose. By
the way, Rose is our new friend for the next two weeks. She is one of the
other fifth grade teachers at Willowdale with Tony. It is nice to have
her with us even if it is for just a short time. Welcome, Rose.
Our after dinner movie was filmed by Rutgers
University. It consisted of
segments of different classrooms in New Jersey that use handhels. It was
interesting, but nothing could out shine what came next. We got a special
gift from Tony. He presented us with the very expensive (i.e. free) gift
of the Palm Educational Solutions CD-ROM. It has several demos of applications
that can be purchased for use on our handhelds. Thank you, Tony.
Finally, we were off to the computer lab to look on the web for applications
we wanted to download to our handhels. Tony directed us to his favorites,
freewareplam.com and PalmGear.com. You
can find these and other links at
learninginhand.com under the applications link. I
personally liked the
application, I.Q.
Test, I found on freewarepalm.com under the misc/fun
category. It’s
perfect for that know-it-all in your life. For school, I found a couple
applications that help students organize their assignments. I really liked
that. You can really use that in Middle School.
Before we knew it, it was time to go home. Fair well my friends, until
we meet again!
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