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February 15, 2002
A Report Card on Handheld Computing (cont'd)
Still a Few Kinks
"My kids were so excited the day we started, they were shaking," Anderson told us. But, as a 14-year teaching veteran and master teacher, he has a healthy skepticism about such enthusiasm.
Beyond the palling effects of time, he and other educators we spoke with raised additional concerns. Handheld computers were built for business people, not school kids, so they're not as rugged as educators might like. Their glass LCD screens make dropping a danger. Theft is a real worry, too, although none of the teachers interviewed for this article had experienced theft even after working with handheld computers for two years.
Underlying these concerns, however, is the larger question of dependence on a particular technology: What happens when you've built a lesson that requires students to have their own devices, and then for some reason one or more become unavailable or nonfunctional? This is especially a problem when kids take the devices home with them. For example, some educators we talked to have found that inevitably some kids forget to bring their handhelds to school, or haven't properly recharged the device. One way schools are addressing this issue is by creating a cache of classroom sets that can substitute for forgotten or malfunctioning devices. Or, in the case of District 230, they give students and their families the option to purchase a device (monthly payment and leasing options are available), while also having classroom sets on hand.
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| Tech support has been cited as one of the most critical--and often overlooked--components for sustaining a handheld computing program. |
Creating a classroom set, however, does not solve another thorny problem: adequate tech support. The lack of tech support in schools is widespread, but the problem can be particularly acute when you're dealing with a ubiquitous computing environment using a "new" technology. Rick Robb, an English teacher who has been involved in one of Mindsurf's pilot schools, reports that having a student tech support team is crucial. "Fifty percent of the time the problems are fairly minor: a wireless networking card not pushed in all the way, a stylus jammed in the wrong way, a frozen screen that requires rebooting," he says. However, when more serious problems occur, such as network traffic slowdowns, more advanced tech support becomes an issue. For example, schools with site-based IT staff can often solve network problems by redesigning the network or finding ways to discourage students from downloading large, multimedia-heavy files. But, as is the case with other types of technology, schools without adequate support can be stopped in their tracks when problems crop up.
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