Through her research at The Concord Consortium, Carolyn Staudt has become excited about the educational uses of handheld computers. She spoke with Mike Lorion, Vice President for Education at Palm, Inc., about the future of handhelds in the classroom and some of the challenges ahead.

Carolyn Staudt    Mike, as you and I know, new handheld technologies are finding a place in education. I've been doing research on using handhelds in grade schools and middle schools for several years, and the results are exciting. Coupled with inexpensive networks, handheld computers are enabling students to carry their own personal tools of inquiry everywhere--class, school, home. Kids can use them in the classroom or take them out in the field! Since they're equipped with a drawing program and a facility for taking notes, they're able to link together the student's own thoughts and questions. Handhelds provide an integrated system of inquiry.

Mike Lorion    I think the technology goals of the country, so to speak, map very well to what we're doing. There are some pieces of research that say that students and faculty are taking to individual-type devices--whether that be single-use devices like cell phones, or graphing calculators. The content is in a form now where it can be easily accessible because it has been brought to this network base infrastructure. And the infrastructure to deliver it to the students is there based on what's happening with the wiring of the classrooms and the e-rate.

Now, if we could finally get to the point where in classrooms students could show the same affection to learning as they do to games. Students have already gone to handhelds for that stuff. Six million Game Boys sold in this country last year, six million. If we think our screen is small, we have a 3x advantage.

The trouble I saw in the ten years that I was doing technology schools at Apple was that you still have to get past the booting and you still have to get past the problems. Versus, I press the button, it comes on, I do things.

CS    With PCs there are too many steps in order to get connected to their stored materials. Handhelds provide a personal tool that enables students to have an immediate reservoir for their experiences. With a simple push of a button and a tap of the screen, students record their thoughts or enter the results of a survey. Simple snap-on devices allow the students to record photographs, GPS locations, or even temperature and heart rates anytime, anyplace. With infrared or wireless capabilities, these tools can become their link between other student researchers and experts on the Web.

ML    Right. The other part of it, though, is how do we make teachers feel comfortable enough with the technology so they truly use it all the time?

CS    First, you have to change the role of the teacher in the classroom. When you empower students with their own personal collection, research, and collaboration tools, their educational experience expands beyond the teacher-centered classroom. The role of the teacher shifts to one that is more meaningful. Teachers become true mentors that help students learn through their own experiences and ask their own questions. You encourage them to think. Foremost in all of the curriculum standards that exist in our country is the promotion of inquiry.

One way to support this new role for teachers is to provide them with handhelds. Give the teachers themselves the tool that will change the focus of their classrooms. But there is something more important. That is introducing teachers to teaching strategies--ones that use handheld applications--that match their existing course objectives and curriculum. These strategies are alternatives to lectures. They allow teachers to encourage the collection and research of individual student artifacts that can be shared with classmates.

You can easily put a handheld in the hands of six or seven students for the price of one desktop computer. My dream is to put handhelds in the hands of all kids so they can connect to the Web anytime. I want to see collaboration with students from around the world. As a former teacher, I guarantee that the added value of personal exploration and exposure to more diverse environments will provide a more meaningful educational experience for teachers and students.

ML    Guaranteed. Traditionally, the way the desktop applications have been used is a student really has to get on there and do something for twenty minutes. Now you've taken a third of the class time. We think, though, with our package of technology--just the mobility aspect alone--we think we can do a lot for learning around that.

CS    I was at a presentation where someone complained that every student was required to get a TI calculator and now they're going to have to buy a Palm. They saw it as an add-on, when it actually could replace that calculator. And it's better because of the note taking capability and all the beaming that can happen with it.

ML    You can do the same thing with a Palm as with a graphing calculator, but what I can't do with a graphing calculator is get an image that's really defined by the size of the screen. I can also do animations, so if I was doing a mathematical problem, I could check sine waves and frequency. I can actually do a simulation of this based on the animation tools that we've put in. Then you can take the data and instead of looking at it in the form of a graph you can look at it as a table as well.

CS    Often students have to collect data in a traditional laboratory or classroom activity. The lesson centers around the collection of the data and not the analysis of that data. By using the handheld computer, the students can do so much more. They can explain directly on the device what they see, display and manipulate the data in different ways, while still recording their thoughts and predictions. They can instantly perform another activity to prove their assumptions. This opens the door to true problem solving. Just imagine that these questions can now be asked wherever the students are ... in the grocery store, in the car, at a family reunion, at a sports event, wherever. The students are asking "What if" questions and instantly acting on them.

Many teachers are afraid of allowing a handheld computer into a classroom test. I remember when the American Chemical Society made students memorize the periodic table on their year-end standardized tests. That no longer happens. What's more important--understanding the trends that exist on a periodic table or memorizing the atomic numbers and weights? No, a handheld won't be allowed into an AP test as of right now. But if you teach kids how to think about challenging questions, not just memorize answers, it doesn't matter how much information you have stored on a handheld.

ML    Let's look inside a kid's backpack. Kids carry around a year's worth of curriculum in their backpack in the form of bound paper. They've got a number of different other tools that they use. It's a huge communications vehicle. When you think of the permission slips and the notes to parents and all these things that go back and forth, it's pretty much how the school communicates to parents outside of the twice-a-year parent-teacher conference.

Now, when you look at the digital landscape, at all the things that are happening, the handheld computer is communication, but it's also infotainment, edutainment, whatever you might want to call it. It should handle lots of these functions to the degree that people really need them. Obviously they're not going to be the ultimate video camera, but you can use it as a video camera. You can plug in a camera and do an okay version of a digital camera. There are a lot of things that you can do around this technology. On the content side there are a ton of things going on as far as what's available.

CS    Many of the applications that already exist on handhelds provide lots of organizational capabilities--spreadsheets, databases, alternative displays for data. On top of this, the portable and beamable ability of the handhelds allow students to capture information in context and share it with others. Educational software is being developed that allows students to record their own personal ecological footprints, breed their own species of fish in a simulated pond--and even beam fish to or from another student's pond! They can calculate statistical results from an on-the-spot poll. And that's just for starters. I don't think people know these things exist.

ML    From a networking standpoint, what we've been able to do with HotSync server really gives the ability for the handheld to fit very nicely in the networked architecture of a school. You have the ability to communicate with email servers, administrative applications, and databases that include student records, but also to content.

Now here, I think, is the big idea. Let's assume that first of all we've got this server. And on this server we have to make sure there's every student and their "locker." Outside of files being stored and those kinds of things for each one of the students, what's the other most important information that they have? It's what they have to do. Every student has a calendar that deals with multiple courses, multiple teachers, and multiple activities. I want a way that students, when they go to a web interface, can say here are the four classes that I'm taking, here is my extramural activity, here's my sports activity, here's my personal stuff, now give me an integrated calendar.

CS    That is exactly what one of the schools I work with is doing. Parents can come to the school's web site at any time and see what their kids are doing every single day in class.

ML    If I'm a parent with several kids, I can go to my Palm and find out when my kids' home-work is due, what permission slips have to be signed. This is what will revolutionize communication between teacher and student and parent. It can really make that triangle get much better.

Microsoft talks a lot about "anything, anywhere" kind of networking. What the handheld brings is the "anyone."

So what are we doing in the future? Obviously, better color, expandability. We'll have little postage stamp cards you'll be able to plug in, because for some functions like the encyclopedia and dictionary, you want to have it all there and you want it to be very quick. I don't want to get it from the Web.

CS    So how do you respond to the equity issue? What are you going to do about kids whose parents can't afford the devices?

ML    Rather than us discounting every one of our products by ten percent, I'd rather grant the schools extra units with their purchase in order to meet the needs of the students who can't afford them.

CS    In one of our projects, parents who want to buy a Palm can buy it outright. If they want to rent it, the rent is low. But if that's impossible, the child can use an institutional Palm from a classroom set. They're not going to restrict any child from having one.

ML    If you look at some of the studies we've done around the usage of handhelds overall, and we've been doing this for a while, one of the things that's pretty apparent is that people tend to use handhelds somewhere between ten to fifteen times a day but for two to three minutes per usage.

CS    Because they're using them as organizers.

ML    But I think based on that kind of usage pattern it's much easier to adapt to the existing curriculum. You don't have to figure out how to get students to sit down for twenty minutes in order to incorporate it into the curriculum.

CS    With data logging and the note taking and drawing, kids do twenty minutes plus. It's hard to get them in and out in a 45-minute period. In fact, you want them to continue even outside of class, in their world.

ML    But it's focused on a lot of the existing curriculum, right?

CS    Right.

ML    In partnership with Scholastic we gave five kids Palms VIIs with keyboards and sent them to the Republican and Democratic conventions as reporters. They could upload their stories to Scholastic for publication on the Web.

CS    See, that's what I call collaboration. The mobility and the beaming are by far the most powerful reason why I want to put them in kids' hands.

ML    Of course you're not going to sit down and write your whole report on the Palm, but it complements all the other multimedia tools.

CS    Concerning writing on the Palm, second graders in one of my research classes felt a lot better working on the Palm to write. I was having them just use the memo pad, but they were all using the on-screen keyboard without the stylus. They were using their two thumbs, like a Game Boy. According to the teacher, the writing capability in that class improved from the year before.

ML    What do you think with lower-grade kids is the number one problem as far as using Palms in the classroom?

CS    Durability. When you take those kids out to the playground and they accidentally drop one, they're devastated. For younger kids it's got to be durable.

ML    The number one thing we get complaints about is the size of the screen.

CS    I was told it was not the under-size screen but the keyboard--kids' motor abilities would not allow them to use it. But then I went to a second grade classroom and the kids had absolutely no problems with the size of the screen. Now, whether it's color or not does make a difference to them.

I'm going to jump back, because I remembered another problem with the handhelds in classrooms is batteries. Anything you put in the hands of students has to be rechargeable because teachers or parents cannot keep up with the batteries. And it becomes an equity problem again because it's expensive.

ML    We're moving to all rechargeable.

CS    That's great. But to wrap up, let's just say that the most important challenge to using handhelds in the classroom is to develop meaningful strategies. Teachers, students and parents need to be reassured that the software that goes onto to the handheld makes kids think and helps them learn.

For more information about the use of handheld computers and probes in education, visit: our web site probesight.concord.org or contact Carolyn Staudt at The Concord Consortium.
carolyn@concord.org

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