Handsprings for Kids?

Posted by Cliff on Monday July 8, 2002 @11:55PM from the providing-better-tools-for-their-education dept.

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?

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Tech Too Early by CiceroLove · 2002-07-09 03:21 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.