Handheld Resources for Educators

I do not know how many classrooms and schools are actually using handhelds, but I suspect it is small and growing, given the number of sites and services I found dedicated to the use of handhelds in education.

If you have any doubts about the range of applications for handhelds, consult 101 Great Educational Uses for your Handheld Computer published by K12 Handhelds.

It's not clear who publishes handheldeducation.com, but it appears to offer unbiased, helpful resources to handheld software, hardware, as well as reviews and other web resources.

The Concord Consortium offers a site dedicated to ubiquitous computing in education, including a comprehensive supplier/vendor index. They also have created a searchable library of online reviews of Palm applications in education. Each review includes a description, a rating, download link, recommended users, and relevant academic subjects. You can learn more about Cooties, one of the more famous applications, enabling students to experience a virus-transfer simulation and in doing so, learn principles of algebra, biology, history, math and statistics.

For the futuristic-minded, IDEO and the Center for Innovative Learning Technologies produced a report defining the DataGotchi, a handheld device designed specifically for education purposes. It includes product requirements and descriptive scenarios.

Additional resources include:

The University of Michigan Center for Highly Interactive Computing in Education with its handheld computing site. Their many handheld software applications are now licensed by and available at goknow.

education@PalmOne

The Idea Bank at Palm Education Pioneers

pdaED.com

Comments

[John Weidner]

The StudyStack web site, home to over 75,000 free online flashcards, recently added support for exporting flashcards from their website to the PalmOS. StudyStack allows students to enter data and study it using a variety of tools including flashcards, a matching game, a hangman game, and a word search puzzle. And now, with the capability to export the data to your PDA you can study your data anywhere.

Please visit http://www.studystack.com for more details.