How PDAs Intersect With School

An Anonymous Coward writes: "It's never too young to be a yuppie. An engineering professor at the University of Michigan is studying how handheld technology can be incorporated in elementary and high schools. His theory is that PDAs can provide students with a much more interactive and cheaper means of learning than desktop computers. The professor has created a number of interesting applications for using PDAs in school, including a 'cooties' simulator, where students beam around a virus from Palm to Palm and then figure out how it propagated. The New York Times covers the use of PDAs in classrooms here, and Wired News has an article here talking about schools who ban students from carrying PDAs." Both articles focus on Palm OS devices at a school in Ann Arbor, but only the Wired piece points out that the devices were banned there last year.

Comments

banning pda's?

[seinman]

i'm a high school senior and have been using a palm pilot for the last two years. it has done nothing but help me with my studies. how can schools actually BAN such usefull devices??? i understand not allowing games (i have wasted many an hour playing dope wars myself) and making you shut the things up (none of my teachers want it beeping in class) but they also offer such a great educational value that they should not be banned, but instead encouraged.

UCSD has a similar thing for College Students

[hackman]

This seems to be a popular topic recently, UCSD is researching uses for student PDAs on a wide scale. I believe several hundred UCSD freshman in CS are going to be semi-permanently "loaned" HP Journada PDAs in order to participate in this experiment on a wider scale.. cool stuff check here for more info: http://www.calit2.net/education/activeweb.html

Re:Morons- All Of You! - Your Opinion Noted

[q-soe]

You have a right to your opinion and i think that in the example you mention you are justified.

However there is the other side to the coin - i work as an IS manager and have half a dozen remote sites to support. I use my palm Vx extensively and so do my staff - they are admittedly not the most practical thing for taking notes with (yuck) but they have a great many good uses.

I have the follwing stuff i use every day in mine (and my staff have most of it too)
- Database of file extensions (usefull as hell)
- Database of cable / termination / cable maps
- Netork database with all site info
- Database of common fault types in our environment
- All hone and contact numbers for all offices
- Patch panel diagrams for all sites
- Router configs for sites
- We can download current calls from our call database and take them with us
- Various database on applications etc

I also have a few games and half a dozen books (1984, Brave newq world, etc - what i feel like reading) and can download my mail and jot small qucik notes when onsite - as well as syncing with my out look

The best thing is that all of this software we use is freeware (bar one database program we bought licenses for) we can convert anything into a PDB file by using isoloweb (www.isilo.com) and we use a number of database aps to create smalll database for them - its quick and easy and bloody usefull - and the best thing is with all of it in my palm including meg launcher, a dozen hacks and games i still have 4mb of the 8mb memory free.

My staff dont lug notebooks out to sites unless they have to (and thats very seldom, and i dont need to lug my notebook home each nght (i have my latest emails on it and all my contacts)

In short i think the palm is incredily usefull - and i am a person who thought they were over priced toys - dont forget that just because you meet one moron that all the other people are neccesarily morons (otherwise i would never have used linux - you should have met the first guy i knew with that :) )