I have a very busy summer designing professional development sessions to support learning with technology. Visit me at the Success Link Handheld Conference in Missouri, July 11th and 12th for some hands on handheld training at the beautiful Tan Tar A Resort in Osage Beach.

Handhelds in Science and Social Science: A Reading and Writing Connection
A project using handhelds to embed reading strategies in science and social science instruction works! Learn how thirty seven school districts implemented handheld integration into classrooms in Northern Illinois. Gain hands-on experience with activities that teachers created to increase student understanding in the content areas.

Free Must Have Palm OS Apps for Active Learning
These are absolutely the essential Palm OS applications that encourage and support an active learning environment! Find out what works best for writing, collaboration, note-taking, and other knowledge management tasks. Not only will you get the apps, you’ll get ideas for using them with students. These have been tested by over one hundred teachers and thousands fo students. And yes, they’re free!




Classroom Instruction that Works with Handhelds
Researchers have identified nine instructional strategies that are most likely to improve student achievement across all content areas and across all grade levels. Set aside the drill and practice software and begin to use the power of handhelds to create student learning activities that help students identify similarities and differences, summarize, take notes, give nonlinguistic representations to content and concepts, generate and test hypotheses and provide cues, questions, and advance organizers. Blend Robert Marzano’s research study results to increase student learning in your handheld classroom. Palm OS handhelds will be used in this session, however ideas can be applied to Pocket PC use.



Classroom Assessment Using Handhelds
In this session participants will explore how handhelds can be used to support research-based strategies for classroom assessment. Learn ways to create seamless and ongoing student activities to monitor student understanding using Palm Desktop applications, Inspiration for Palm OS, Docs to Go, quizzing software and other free Palm OS applications. If you would like some tips for collecting and grading student handheld artifacts or are just looking for ideas to get students involved in assessment strategies this session is for you! Many ideas will be shared for getting students to demonstrate and communicate their understanding of content and concepts. Palm OS handhelds will be used in this session, however ideas can be applied to Pocket PC use.

A recent article posted in theMay 24, 2005
eSchool News, Ed 'visionaries': Schools Must Change
by Robert Brumfield, Assistant Editor is worth taking note. For the past two decades educators have been told that technology should transform teaching and learning, but those of us who have been around supporting technology in learning for the past 20 years have only seen incremental changes in the ways schools "work" and the ways teachers "teach", but big changes in what students do to support their learning outside of "school".

The article highlights the discussion from Intel Corp.'s fourth annual Education Visionary Conference held May 18 in
Washington, D.C. According to the speakers at
this year's event titled Educators Driving Change in
Communities: Creating New Uses for Technology and Impacting Economic Development.
today's educational system needs a complete overhaul--and technology is precisely the agent to accomplish this change.
At this summit ten leaders in the ed-tech field gave rapid-fire talks to school, government, and business officials from around the country. Attendees included representatives from Dell, Futurekids, IBM, Michigan's Freedom to Learn laptop initiative, Microsoft, Pitsco, Riverdeep, Scholastic, Schoolnet, SMART Technologies, and eSchool News.
.
The visionaries argued that paper-based educational systems do not make any sense to kids. Susan Patrick, the director of educational technology for the U.S. Department of Education questioned "Is our educational system geared toward innovation? Do we want an 18th-century model or a 21st-century model for our schools? The 18th-century model is the one we have now."

I love this quote from Patrick: "The ed-tech community loves the term 'integration.' But our schools need transformation, not integration. Patrick argues that simply integrating technology into instruction, is an acceptance of the existing environment, the existing instructional model of teaching and that we are short changing kids." I agree with her that we need to build instruction for personalized, customized learning for every student's needs. Wow! A one-to-one computing reference!!

While this is not a "new" concept produced from this meeting, the continued press about technology and learning is GOOD!
As one professional development specialist, I will continue to assist teachers in transforming teaching and learning with technology, putting a spin on "integration" that gets at higher level thinking in meaningful student learning activities.

Some other notables from the article to chew...

Ken Ender, president of the Cumberland Community College in Cumberland, New Jersey, took the stance that the world of K-12 education is "totally disconnected [and] unable to meet the expectations of the 21st-century work force and the basic 21st-century literacy skills necessary for colleges. His quote, "What does it mean for our economy and way of life when 80 percent of the students who do enter college need basic skills courses when they get there?"

Also citing the work of technology expert Willard Daggett, Ender said, "American students need to emerge from their K-12 education with strong backgrounds in the biology, physics, math, and high-level reading skills necessary to make the transition to the 21st-century business world."

A notable comment by Ender urged school communities to examine the 12 industries that have been identified by the government as high-growth--including information, bio-, and geospatial technologies, as well as advanced manufacturing--and make certain that the curricula used by local schools is aligned to meet thedemands of those professions.

I think there is truth to this...maybe more at high school...but also has value even in elementary school.

"You should be angry--it's [education] all out of whack," Ender said. "Leadership and education need to prepare our students to compete in a global economy."

Tracey Fraley from MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas
where a one-to-one laptop program has been implemented, noted some key processes changing. One of those processes was changing the culturally engrained teacher-student dynamic. Fraley said the laptop program has been an important part of rethinking the traditional ways of running a high school. She has put in place an after-hours program. MacArthur is now open from 6:30 a.m. to midnight so that kids can have wireless internet access when they need it.

Are you using handhelds with students? Are you looking for ways teachers are organizing classroom instruction using handhelds? Do you just want to see handhelds in action in a classroom?

Well...here are some websites that highlight classroom use of handhelds. Send me your classroom website for handheld use!

A collection of 5th grade teachers websites for combining active learning strategies and handhelds in science and social science.

The Paperless Classroom testing and experimenting with one-on-one technology.

Studio Four classroom page for using handhelds with students

Mr Cring's classroom where technology and learning go hand in hand

Circa 5 fifth grade classroom artifacts for handhelds in learning

Delmar students have created e-books to share!

Adventure Fourth using handhelds with students

Planet 5th archives for using handhelds with Mr. Vincent's students

Northwest Technical School highlights classroom uses of handhelds

Party with Your Palms a site created by a group of sixth grade girls

So many times when I work with educators using handhelds they talk about how they wished they could project the Palm OS handheld screen so that the whole class could view a demonstration. Many have access to a LCD projector for their computers, but not a docment camera to project the handheld device.

I have created some tips for those teachers who would like to use the Palm OS Emulator and Simulator on a computer to demonstrate handheld use to students. The Simulator and Emulator are part of the POSE environment.

While I don't cover all the basic uses of the Emulator, I have created some time-saving tips for those who use handheld applications that are not part of the Palm OS apps and are tired of loading those apps into the Emulator/Simulator one by one. This is a great tool for demonstrating handheld use to a classroom of students or to use with teachers and administrators during professional development.

Coming back to life after a hard drive crash has been yet another painful experience on my technology road. That is not to say that I knew it could happen, odds were for it happening, yes, it has happened to me before...I am already over the files I lost because I didn't do a recent back up...I regret the email I may never reply to because, yes, all that is gone....but the one thing I am thankful for losing are all my favorite URLs that were stored in Internet Explorer!

You don't believe me...it is true because I now FURL instead of using boomarks for favorites that are stuck in a browser on a single computer. FURL has made it possible for me to share all of my web resources with everyone online. You can visit my FURLed sites.
I have set up categories to contain my urls and can determine if the urls are private, only for my viewing, or public online viewing. It is so easy to FURL new urls with the toolbar button that is linked in my favorite browser. When I find a url that I want to archive, all I do is click the FURL toolbar in my browser . I record a short description for my FURLed url and select the category I would like it referenced in. It is that simple for me to make my urls available to you! Oh, and did I mention that this is FREE!!!!

Now teachers, think of the possibilities!
1. You could publish links for students to activate their prior knowledge about content .

2. Share classroom resources for students and parents.

3. Create a classroom FURL site where students can add resources pertaining to a topic of study.

4. You could use FURL links for supporting your differentiated student tasks with varied level of text.

5. Collaborate with your grade level teaching team to find web resources for content area study so that everyone can contribute and reap the benefits of teamwork!

6. Students are using this outside the classroom:)

7. Create links to virtual manipulatives and other learning tools for students easy access!

8. Try out FURLing and email me with other ideas of how teachers are using FURL for classroom management and student learning activities. I will post them here!!

By the way----check out my Virtual Tools and Manipulatives category to find some useful online tools for students!

Well, the inevitable happened with technology...my hard drive crashed! Due to an interruption with my blog software there is a link now to my previous blogs called Past Blog Topics in my Links Bar on the right.

But about the CRASH! There were no symptoms that I could detect. I woke up after a late night of preparing for training sessions and the dreaded "can't find the operating system" error!! All my previous month's work--GONE! Yes, I do not always practice what I preach...my last file backup was 29 days ago!!! But remember I said THERE WERE NO SYMPTOMS!

But, come to find out that was not totally true, there was a clicking of the hard drive I hadn't noticed, but one had to put an ear right by the drive to hear it!

So for all those out there that work from a non-networked server environment like a home or home office and need to backup on a shoestring budget, I offer some sage advice:

1) You have a CD burner, right?! Well use it! Any time you create files, have email or a list of favorites that you could not bear to lose, burn to a CDRW to save your files. I now have a stack! It is the quickest way to backup data but you have to remember to do so!

2) Leave your email on your ISP's server for a period of time before they are deleted, if possible. That way they will still be available after something happens to your computer.

3) Consider a web-based mail account like G-Mail, Hotmail, etc.

4) Use Furl to keep track of your archives of favorites or bookmarks of urls. The pain about backing up your files is that you have to remember more than just dragging a folder to a CDRW. Remembering to export your favorites/bookmarks is a hassle! A better solution may be to have a web-based solution for your favorite urls.

5) Label the disks you burn so that you don't have to go through everyone to find the files you are looking for when you restore to another machine. (Sounds simple right, but it seems that one is always in a hurry when doing a backup!)

6) Use an inexpensive flash/thumb drive to save your files. Mine ofcourse would need to be over 2 gigs for all my data.

7) And ofcourse, tell your friends about your mishap, so that it might jog them into thinking it may happen to them!! Just one week after my crash, my friend Meg also lost her hard drive!

8) Friends---heed the advice of colleagues when they tell you their system crashed and do something with your files before it happens to you!