Handsprings for Kids?

matt conway asks: "I'm working in an alternative school for 'at-risk' kids: Inner-city, economically disadvantaged, K-8, in a midwestern rust-belt city. Seems Handspring has a program to provide their hardware for these kids. I'm looking for suggestions on how to use their products to give these kids a leg up in life. Obvious uses are collaborative class projects beamed back and forth, GPS to map out neighborhoods and incidental environmental data, digital photography and writing to produce a school paper. I'm not a CS major, so I wondered if ./ readers had more suggestions for turning hardware into better brains." If Handsprings aren't ideal for this sort of thing, what handhelds might be a decent replacement?

Comments

Tech isn't necessarily the answer

[R2.0]

A handspring runs what, $100 wholesale? For that money you could get the entire library of Heinlein juveniles - for each kid.

www.abebooks.com

"Tunnel in the Sky": teaches about self reliance and teamwork. 110 copies, $2-$5 a piece

"Starship Troopers": Honor, courage, and a case history in how Holleywood can really screw up a good story. 159 copies, $2-$6 a piece.

"Rocket Ship Galileo": Teach history by looking at what we thought the future would be like over 50 years ago, i.e WHY don't we have nuclear powered rockets piloted by teenage kids. 39 copies, $3-$10 (make them share)

Buy a few copies per kid - make them swap.

Just have to have tech? Find e-book versions of them.

And the list goes on.

Tech Too Early

[CiceroLove]

I love technology as much as the next guy but let's get real. Putting Handsprings within reach of the average at-risk kid is simply foolish. If you all remember the principle of GIGO, these kids do not have the large skill set to be able to use these things to the PDA's potential. Give them books to read, better classrooms to study in, pay the teachers to sit around with the kids more. At-risk kids need to have the fundamental education we all got when we were kids. They won't get it by using a Handspring.

Re:Tech Too Early

[MrResistor]

I wish I had mod points to mod you up, because that is exactly what I was going to say.

There seems to be a misconception in the US that money and technology will solve all problems. While they can certainly help, they are not the solution, but rather the tools used to affect it. The thing we forget is that tools are often interchangable, and the most technologically advanced is not always the best for the job.

A pencil and a peice of paper are the best tools around for teaching concepts of math, for example. A calculator is more high-tech, and possibly more impressive to the casual observer, but the student will learn far less using one, and it's a lot more expensive.

I have to give the article credit, though, in that this is the first time I've seen any suggestions for using tech in primary education that I consider legitimate, helpful, or even non-counterproductive to the ultimate goal of education. Maybe a class project to map the migrations of transients using local maps and GPS. Political Correctness issues aside, I would have been way into something like that as a kid. Maybe marking locations and descriptions of plants around the school would be more appropriate...

Anyway, technology can be good for education, but all too often it does more harm than good as our boundless enthusiasm leads to its misuse. All things considered, the money would be much better spent on higher quality books, both fiction and nonfiction, or even just making sure the kids all have basic school supplies like pencils and paper and maybe a binder to keep it all organized.

Time, not Tech.

[Glonoinha]

In as few words as possible:

If you want to give inner city kids a chance give them Time, not Tech.

Pick five of these kids and spend an hour apiece with each one of them per week. Or maybe a five hour visit with the group per week. Take em to a park bench and just shoot straight with them. Tell them honestly about the benefits of education, the value of keeping their word and doing good, the extreme penalty associated with becoming an unwed teenage mother (or father.) Tell them about how a 3 year enlistment in the military will fund their GI Bill give them the self respect, focus, drive, and other skills necessary to succeed. Show them why life isn't about the quick score, but about living a life worth remembering. Tell them about the mistakes you made in life - so maybe they can learn from your mistakes. Explain that their parents are not always right, but they are doing the best they know how to do. Be someone they look up to, respect, and admire - if even one kid stays out of trouble just one time for no other reason than he didn't want to let you down ... you have done more than a thousand Handsprings could ever accomplish.

Bring a camera. Take a lot of pictures of them - even though they will be apprehensive at first. Teach them to always be proud of who they are and what they are doing, live life as if someone was filming them ... ( because odds are someone is :) ) This is an easy way for them to understand : if you are always doing what you know is right, it doesn't matter who is watching, and who is taking pictures.

When they reach adulthood in 10 years it won't matter if they could use a Palm Pilot in grammar school or not (qv C=64) but having pride in who they are and respect for others, respect for themselves, and an eagerness to live a good life will make all the difference in the world.

Glonoinha

In Other News...

[GrandCow]

The price for secondhand Handspring's plummeted after a deluge of used Visors hit local pawn shops. Also, apparently drug dealers are able to keep much better track of their appointments due also to a mass influx of visors being swapped for addicts driugs of choice.

This is pointless

[Mr. Shiny And New]

I'm sure that the one thing that will make those disadvantaged children break out of their ruts and become the model citizens we want them to be is for them to be well organized with their shiny new handsprings.

Come on, as if a PDA is what a school-child (in any socio-economic condition) needs. What ever happend to reading books? and doing math by hand? I was in a stationery store the other day and noticed that the math sets (compass, dividers, rulers, triangles, etc) now include a calculator. Sheesh! As if people weren't already bad enough at math!

I'm all for having a computer in the classroom. Heck, I think learning to program a computer is a useful activity because it encourages problem solving and creativity. However, teaching students to use a Handspring seems a little pointless. Students need to learn concepts, not tools. They need to learn English and grammar, not how to run the spell-checker.

There is one exception to my anti-Handspring stance. If the school had some learning activity that could only realistically be done on a set of Handsprings, and that wasn't technology related, then I'd agree that having a class set, that must be signed-in/out for each class, might be a good idea. Just like how my school had microscopes, not so that we could learn optics, but so that we could learn about cells, it would be acceptable for the school to use computing devices (of any nature) to achieve some other goal. However, if it's just data collection, I'd say it's not really worth it.

There needs to be a focus on learning the principles. For example, when teaching a student about navigation and maps and orienteering, don't give them a GPS. Give them a compass and teach them how to pace out a path. When teaching students about graphing weather trends, make them graph it on paper. They won't have so much data that they need a computer to do it. If they WANT to use a computer, maybe it's ok if they learn it on their own, but don't make it the objective.

Computers are a tool; a means, not an end.