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Thursday 4/1/04 Reported & Photographed by Janet |
Class
Log |
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Entering
an elementary school on April Fool’s day can be a little disconcerting.
Who knows what went on during the day? Class started strangely with
Tony announcing that he had made a mistake, we didn’t have
to present our programs after all, and Sheila was going to be late,
but she was bringing dinner. Both announcements brought both a sense
of relief and one of confusion. Plan ahead, super organized Tony
making an organizational error? Was this an April Fool’s
joke? Tim’s handheld came without a calculator, and the CD-ROM accompanying it didn’t have one either. So last week during the software search portion of the class, Tim looked for calculators. He showed us snapCalc5. The best feature of this program is the ability to re-purpose a button so the calculator can be launched while another application is open. Tim created a new memo, and then he tapped the Star button on his handheld and a small calculator opened in the middle of the screen. It filled the screen when he tapped the calculator. To remove it, Tim tapped the button again. Tim said he would use it with his first-grader in conjunction with the calendar program. Janet showed the program Converter. The application is a great reference that converts just about anything. She showed us how she can convert silly things like shoe sizes from US Women to European sizes. A size 8 in the US is a size 38 in Europe. Then she showed more education-based conversions like weights. The class worked with the ancient measure of chains. We found out that one chain equals 66 feet. We also experimented with tons LONG and tons SHORT. Sheila showed us Mobile Stopwatch, which she had used earlier with a student. She had challenged the student to answer questions in less than 10 seconds. She said he stayed on task and was very motivated to beat the timer. This lead to an interesting discussion about how timing can be a very effective student motivator. Tony took over the class again and showed us two graphic organizers. First he showed PiCoMap, a simple black and white organizer and beamed it to us to try. Next he showed us Idea Pad, a more advanced graphic organizer. This one is in color, allows you to choose shapes for the items, lets you add notes to each item, and allows you to view the text in an outline. The outline can be exported to Memo Pad. To Do List items can be imported. We all liked it and were anxious to try it, but it was dinner time. Our wonderful Mexican dinner, provided by Shiela, included soft or hard shell tacos, rice salad, cookies and candy. An engaging dinner discussion about discipline and student motivation made the dinner break fly by. We watched a QuickTime movie of a middle school in Bloomington Hills, Michigan where students use handhelds as part of their school day. It was interesting to see that all the software that they used Tony has shown us. I looked over during the discussion and noticed that Steph and joined us. She’d had to coach her team’s soccer game that had been rescheduled for today. Bad weather has played havoc with her schedule of classes. Unfortunately her team lost, but she said they had enjoyed the game anyway. Next we broke into pairs and outlined articles in the District Administration’s Education In Hand journal. Each pair used Idea Pad to outline the article. It was a great way to learn about handhelds and really use Idea Pad. Rose and Steph-the-Slacker (Steph said it, I didn’t) discussed "Winning Big." The article reported how a teacher successfully implemented Palms in his school in Los Vegas. After a software (or Dan) glitch, Sheila and Dan reported on a marine science program in Florida. The people on the couch heckled them about trying to get out of doing the report, but Sheila and Dan got it to work. Tim & Randy reported on a Web-based inquiry science program from UC Berkley. The couch hecklers, Lou & Debbie, told about a kindergarten teacher from Texas who uses handhelds to administer standards tests to her 80 (yes, 80) students. She also used them for other assessments, connectivity, printing and presentations. We discovered that if you enter data in the outline mode of Idea Pad, the graphic mode is a mess until you manually space the components. We all liked the program, though. A review of the software we have used like Sketchy and concept maps followed. The class agreed that simplicity was the essence of using concept maps on a handheld. Idea Pad’s ability to include notes seemed to be ideal because it allows simplicity along with lots of information. The ability to collapse the maps was also a strength. Tony decided to move eBooks to next week. I was really looking forward to that, but maybe next week will be better. We worked with Big Fish, Little Fish, a participatory simulation game. It was great! Half of the class were big fish and half were little fish, as determined by Tony. Amazingly, there weren’t enough big fish so Tony became a big fish, too. In this simulation we all walked around the classroom and pretended we were fish. The big fish had to feed often on the little fish to stay alive. The little fish had to hide so they could continue to reproduce so they could stay alive. The little fish weren’t allowed to say no, so many of us died very quickly. Dan and Debbie hovered facing each other so the big fish would assume one was feeding on the other. This worked very well. Rose was the first to die, followed quickly by the rest of us. Lu, Debbie and Dan survived, proving that bigger isn’t necessarily better. Tony told us how he used this program on a discovery level with his kids. It was a great experience. At 8:31
Tony showed us his favorite game, Hexplode.
It looked like a great program, if you have a
good self-concept
and
can handle
rarely winning a game. It was such a good class
that we forgot to gripe
about getting out late. |