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

what ever you do...

[paradesign]

do not let them install this

dopewars

its addictive

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.