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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.
I remember graphing calculators being banned in math courses. Lots of math courses are now designed around graphing calculators. You just need to recognize the possible problems with the technology (in the case of graphing calculators, learning to push the buttons without having a clue what's going on), and design your course to make them less of a problem and to use the value of the device (you can graph complex equations, and explain why the graph looks like it does).
Sorry to be so blatant.
I've seen people do so many silly things, make so many foolish arguments, all for the sake of their beloved status symbol, the Palm Pilot.
Don't you on with your "Luddite" name-calling! I happen to be a software developer, with hoards of languages behind me, and I'm young (25). I know all about what technology can and can't do, and I Love nothing more than to see good tech advance..
And I'm saying that this here PDA thing is a load of CRAP. Give it 10-15 years, and I'll look at it again. But right now, there's no good reason to shell out $150 for something that's going to pull you backwards in your education.
I had a student once who insisted on spending hoards of time loading his books for class into his Palm Pilot. He copiously took notes into his Palm- a couple sentances by the end of a four hour lecture, and we'd have to hold up class so that he could cram them in there with his stylus. He'd go on and on about the amazing advantages and all the things it could do. While I Love this guy, and he's a good friend- What a fruitcake! He bought the whole Tech=Good thing hook, line, and sinker. Held up class, and held up his own learning. All over a technology fetish.
PDA's are a fad, for the most part. Sure, there are valid uses, and they can really help out in certain areas in our life. But for the most part, it's a fruity fad.
Want to advance your education? Buy your books, and then write in them.
Want to advance your education? Learn, and then think about the things you learned.
TWO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED YEARS ago, Confucius had all the technology he needed to wisely note that studying without thinking is a waste, and thinking without study is a disaster.
If you can so much as get students to think about what they learn and connect it with the world they live in, you'll be far better off than you will by having them nonsensically scribbling on a palm, and they'll learn far more.
Thank you Slashdot once again for reminding me why I'm home schooling my daughter.
Ever since then, I've stuck with the Palm platform, and really like it. You know, take a Visor and combine it with a keyboard (pictures here and here)and you have one heck of a note-taking machine.
The experience I had at our high school is that they wanted to have control of all communications in and out of the building. Here's some examples...
All Internet (well, actually web) connections were run through a filter/proxy server. They even kept a log of denied attempts, which was given to the principal. (I think those were E-Mailed hourly.) Those who had denied attempts would be called to his office. When he called me down there and accused me of surfing porno and chat sites, I denied it. His response was, "You did it and you know it. Everyone has been denying it, but I know better." I asked him to show me logs of it, and he did, and of all things they were BANNER CGIs from IMG tags that are automatically loaded - duh! I sent him an E-Mail with a link to DALnet's logo, which was blocked by the school, then told him to check the logs and see if there was an entry for him. After that, I don't think anyone was called to his office. (Luckily, telnet wasn't logged or anything, so that always worked in a pinch. Also firewalls didn't block ports there, so we could always put in proxy settings to point to a Linux box a few of us ran - which bypassed the filter totally.)
As far as phones - all phone communications is done through the school's phone system, again it can be monitored/controlled by the school.
Sadly enough, the State makes carrying a pager in school a felony. However, they have NO policy on cell phones. Cell phones are banned, but that is local school board policy and not State. They claim that pagers are used for drug dealers (I guess they've never heard of an admin who needs to know about outages.) It's funny how the State bans pagers but not cell phones. If I were a drug dealer, I'd much rather have a cell phone, as it offers two-way communications (whereas most pagers do not.)
I don't think we were ever able to successfully make a modem connection over the school's phone system either. (I had also tried this at another local school with the same type of phone system and had no luck - I did this when the State decided to block our ISPs netblocks, which is where one of the schools sites is hosted and we were supposed to show it to the parents that day.) I don't know if the inability to make modem connections is on purpose or a side effect of wiring problems, etc.
But, I've generally noticed that schools want to control all communications in and out. For that one reason, I mostly used SSH when going out of the school network. (In my senior year one of the labs I worked in got a T1 to a local ISP, which had no filtering or stupid policies as the school LAN did.)
But, how does this all relate to PDAs? I think schools must be afraid that PDAs will offer a channel of communications they cannot control (such as wireless) and they don't like that. My suggestion is that schools deploy some sort of wireless network (802.11b?) and let the students connect their PDAs to that - then they can still sniff/monitor/block what they want.
I think schools need to address the problems that PDAs may cause (if any) and take care of them individually - instead of just banning PDAs altogether.