|
Thursday 4/8/04 Reported & Photographed by Janet |
Class
Log |
       |
Class started right on time tonite. Tony ran us through the agenda and then Lu got us going by showing the program TextTwist. It is a really cool program that will help students who need help with reading and vocabulary. The program is like Scrabble. Players are given a variety of letters (about 6, I think). They receive points for creating words using the letters. It seemed to be a really fun and motivating program. Lu found it on the Palm Educations Solutions 2003 CD-ROM. Dan showed us Due Yesterday. He did a great job showing all of the details of the program. Dan felt it would motivate students at his school to write down assignments, follow-up with the assignments since it reminds them, and allows them to enter grades into the gradebook portion. It’s an amazing program for freeware. He also showed us Sea War. It is a graphic version of the board game Battleship. Randy showed us EduLog, a program that he said would be good for students to record pages they read during free reading. He said that one of his schools has a goal of reading a zillion (I can’t remember how many) pages by the end of the year. Next, Randy showed us SketchPad. It is in color, has many color choices, but only one pen size. The consensus was that it was a fairly good program, but Sketchy is better. Shiela quickly showed us five programs. MathWhiz is a program that teaches order of operations in math. It seems to be a cool program. Tony uses it with his kids every year. Next she showed us Timer MathFacts. This math facts program times the user. It was well-received. Shiela found it on freewarepalm.com Next she showed Lexi. It was a boring-looking flash card program, but she said the desktop computer version that allow you to create the cards was kind of neat. We decided that Quizzler was better. Percent Table was next. It’s like handheld Easy Grader. The user enters points for an assignment and the program tells you the grading scale for it. Finally, she showed Venn. This program looked like a Venn Diagram with all kinds of hard math stuff inside. Randy said he’d seen that screen in a high level math standardized test. She also reported that Stopwatch that she’d reported on last week wasn’t quite as good as she thought. She had set the timer for 10 minutes. The handheld went to sleep and the timer did, too. She said CFB Timer works much better. Wow, I didn’t realize how impressive we were! We did a great job, Tony just had to sit and watch us teach for him. Good planning, Tony! Finally, Tony had
to take over the class. He showed us a great slide show that showed
us the differences
and similarities between AvantGo and FlingIt. Both programs allow the user to send a web page to their
handheld. AvantGo requires users to sign up, give their email address,
and sign up for categories of information they want to stay current
with. As a result, tons of junk mail appears on the user’s computer.
It takes a long time to synchronize because each time you sync, the program
goes to the web to find and download the web pages. You can’t beam
the info. FlingIt allows you go research your own web pages and then
decide to fling them to the handheld. It doesn’t require synching,
but you must have the handheld in the cradle. Then you tell the computer
to fling the page, and you tell the handheld to download the page, and
they talk to each other and viola! It’s done. Fling it requires
you to find your own web pages and download them, so it isn’t as
automatic as AvantGo. FlingIt is from GoKnow, but it will remain free,
which is good news. Next Tony summed up AvantGo, FlingIt and Palm
Reader. After dinner, we watched a video on a Chicago district that purchased 2,200 Palms for their high school kids. The movie showed highlights of teachers and students using the palms with keyboards and science probes. We didn’t feel we learned anything new, but it was a cool video, despite the vacuum cleaner competition in the other 5th grade rooms. We adjourned to the computer lab to use FlingIt, and later, eBook studio. Millard picked tonight to change servers so it was a challenge to get onto Tony’s little web pages page. FlingIt is pretty easy to use and the pages work well on the handheld if you pick a site with few graphics and lots of text. Tony also showed us how to use Palm eBook Studio. It seems to be very easy to use, but it’s not a freebie. There is no demo version either. It seems to me that it’s worth the $30 tho. It’s great to know how to use both of these programs. They can really improve learning in the classroom. We spent the rest of class working with these two programs. Tony beamed us the game Tetravex and the night was brought to a conclusion. |