Manybooks.net provides free eBooks for handhelds. Currently, 10,471 eBooks are available in multiple formats. In fact, for each eBook offered, you have the choice of file formats, including eReader, PDF, and Plucker. You can also choose to read the book online, which is convenient for previewing before downloading and installing on your handheld. The eBooks on Manybooks.net are in the public domain, so most all of the texts have a copyright before 1930. There is a handy category for books published after 1930, however. You can even subscribe to the site’s RSS feed so you can be updated when new books are made available. Although you can find most of the site’s eBooks elsewhere, I like the layout of Manybooks.net—it’s easy to navigate, search, and download.

I had the pleasure of attending a breakout session at the recent MACUL conference by Monique Shorr and three of her students. Monique’s class uses Pocket PCs with GoKnow’s Handhelds Learning Environment. Those sixth graders get a lot of research and communicating done with these tools. In fact, Mrs. Shorr’s class has used their Pocket PCs to help create an online game about European countries. First, you are given clues about the country, complete with a concept map from PiCoMap. Once you guess the country in your head, click to see the answer. The students wrote about their mystery countries and included Sketchy animations (very good ones I might add)! Check it out!

I know most teachers dread when April Fools falls on a school day. I look forward to it because, first off, I am the only one allowed to play jokes. Secondly, I have some fun handheld pranks! If you have a Palm Powered handheld, try these jokes:

Discuss with students what I.Q. is. Explain that you are going to beam the class a program to test I.Q. During the test on their handhelds, students absolutely may not talk or ask questions of any kind. The handheld will give a score at the end of the test to show students how intelligent they are. Beam I.Q. Test and enjoy frustrating your students! Why is it so frustrating? The buttons for the right answers don’t work, so students will end up answering incorrectly to get to the next question. Since three very easy questions were missed, the I.Q. Test’s results will read, “Your I.Q. is lower than a rock’s.”

If you have a Zire 72 or other handheld with a camera, try this prank. Tell a student you want to take his or her photo. Instead of actually taking a photo, have a photo of a monkey or other animal showing on your handheld's screen. Of course, after you take the photo, the student will certainly want to see the picture. Turn your handheld around and show the monkey photo for some laughs.

You handheld can be a mind reader! The applications Mind Reader and The Psychic Rabbit both have the user pick a card and remember it. Then it magically removes the card you picked! The secret: The remaining cards are actually all different from the originals.

Maybe, just maybe, you can look forward to April Fools Day this year!

I’ve finally added a Graffiti 2® classroom alphabet! Simply download the PDF file. Print it on brightly colored paper, laminate the print-outs, and cut out the circles. Tape the circles just below the alphabet that you probably already have posted in your classroom. Now students have a Graffiti 2 reference by glancing up at the front of the classroom!

Click here to see an example and to download the file.

I spent my spring break last week in Michigan. Before presenting at the MACUL conference, I worked with students from eight elementary schools in Bloomfield Hills. These lucky fourth and fifth graders each have an AlphaSmart Dana to use for learning. I demonstrated how handheld computers are much more powerful than the Apple IIe that I had in school when I was their age. In fact, we had one Apple IIe for the entire grade level–not one per student! I exposed the students and teachers (and even several parents) to a variety of software applications available for learning.

I then focused on math programs, culminating with the game Summing. In Summing, you try to clear a screen full of tiles by solving addition problems. Don’t be fooled—Summing takes more than just addition skills! Before I even left the good state of Michigan, a couple of students had beaten my best Summing score of 28. In fact, Ms. Kissinger, a teacher at Conant Elementary, has achieved the best score I have ever seen: 20 (lower scores are better).

The students were great and considered me to be famous since their Danas had a category for applications named “Tony Vincent.” In fact, one fifth grader insisted that I sign his Note Pad.

It was completely worth spending some of my spring break with those Michigan students. Not only were they great learners, but I actually got to have my name on the outdoor sign at Conant Elementary, as you can see in the photo! Maybe I really am famous…

Brian Schau of Denmark stumbled across my Palm OS Wish List and took my idea for an angle measurement game and turned it into a real-life Palm program called Angles!

In Angles, a student estimates the measures of 10 randomly generated angles. The difference between the user’s guess and the actual measure for each angle is added to the score. It’s like golf where students want to get as low of a score as possible. Angles even lists best scores. It’s a simple application, but fun practice for “eyeballing” angles, which is necessary for students to know which set of numbers to use on a protractor!

Download the Angles manual and application from Brian Shau’s website:
http://www.schau.com/s/angles

Thanks Brian!

An Easter egg in a software program is a hidden surprise. Easter eggs are usually activated when a user enters a sequence of commands. Easter eggs could be an animation or other special feature. There are plenty of Easter eggs in the Palm Operating System. Students love revealing these Palm OS 5 Easter eggs:

Guys in Suits:
Start the Giraffe game and place your stylus in the lower right corner. Then press the up button. You'll see a photo of two people in suits!

A Real Easter Egg:
Go into Prefs and select Power. Draw a small circle with your stylus in the lower right corner of the screen (it usually takes a couple tries). A small egg will appear!

Fiery Credits:
With the Easter egg showing, tap Home. Select the Options menu and choose About Applications. Hold the Down button while you tap OK. Repeat the process of choosing About Applications, holding the Down button, and tapping OK two more times. Flaming credits will appear on the third try, but you must keep holding the Down button.

Taxi Cab:
Be sure the Easter egg is showing in the Power preferences. Next, in any application, hold the Down button while drawing a line from the middle of the Graffiti area to the left edge of the screen (between the Home and Menu buttons). A taxi will drive across your screen!

Inchworm:
Go into Prefs and select Power. Using Graffiti, enter a pound sign (#). Wait ten seconds and an inchworm will make its way across your screen!

After finding these surprises in their handhelds, try asking students what Easter eggs they would leave for others if they created a computer program.

Registration is now open for the Mid-Atlantic Handheld Conference being held July 18, 2005!

I have the privilege of being the Keynote Speaker and the conference will offer half-day hands-on sessions and concurrent session throughout the day. Pocket PC and Palm operating systems will be showcased. In addition, Elliot Soloway/Cathie Norris and Karen Fasimpaur of K-12 Handhelds will present!

The cost to attend the conference is only $35.00. This includes breakfast, lunch, and snacks.  What a deal!

The conference will be held in Salisbury, Maryland, which is near some great beaches. So plan a trip to the conference and a vacation!

Click this link to register or visit the website!
http://www.seaford.k12.de.us/mahc/r.htm

palmOne™ has launched its Education Individual Store. This store offers educators, school board members, and other education community members 10% discounts on palmOne handhelds. You probably can find better deals out there than 10% off, but it’s nice of palmOne to offer educators a discount. In fact, they offer a 25% discount on palmOne branded accessories. For example, can save $32 on a Wi-Fi card, $53 on a GPS unit, and $18 on a wireless keyboard.

palmOne continues its Education Purchase Program. When your school buys 30 handhelds, palmOne will send you three free. Buy 100 and get 12 free. Buy 500 and you get 72 free handhelds! You don’t even have to buy them from palmOne—just send in the receipt from your school’s regular computer dealer. In fact, if your institution has purchased at least 30 palmOne handhelds within the last 60 days, you can still take advantage of this offer!

Kim LaBlanc in Lake Charles, Louisiana worked with teachers on a handheld computer integration project. Her project is called PalmQuest and looks like a great professional development experience. Teachers work face-to-face and online to learn about educational uses of handhelds and to design classroom activities. PalmQuest participants are just now entering their lesson plans online. Take a look! The lessons plans are fabulous and you can even search them!

There’s also a wide selection of lesson plans from all over the Web for handhelds listed here.

I have a poster that kids love to hate. It lists the names of colors—but the words are written in a color different than the ones the letters spell. Students try to just read the words and stumble. When the students try to say out loud the colors each word is written in, there’s lots of giggling because it is much harder to do than you think it would be. Our brains have trouble with this task of separating the color a word is written in and the color the word spells. This is called the Stroop Effect.

NextWave Soft has a new free Palm program that is guaranteed to frustrate you and your students: Reflax. Reflax is a game that tests reflexes, both of your mind and of your hand. The game spells a color, but just like my adored/loathed poster, the words are written in different colors. You must tap the colored circle at the bottom of the screen that matches the color the word spells (not the color the word is written in). As you get better at the game, you have less time to select the color. In fact, in the “Uber” level (which you achieve if you have a score above 150) you have 0.7 seconds to make your selection. Also, to increase the difficulty, the circles switch positions! Be sure to tap the right color, because if you get it wrong, two points are subtracted from your score. If time runs out, your game is over.

The game has five excellent help screens. In fact, the help has the best quote to sum up this game: “You’ll get confused [frustrated], but that’s just the point of this game!”

Why does the brain have trouble identifying the colors the words are written in? Read this answer from Paulette Caswell, a neuroscience researcher.

Langley Schools in Langley, British Columbia piloted the use of Palm handhelds in an elementary classroom and a secondary classroom during the 2003-2004 school year. The web site for their project, Technology in Hand, has several videos, including ones about project rationale and benefits of handheld computing.

The site lists the positive impacts of the pilot project. Their findings sound very familiar: “Reports from the teachers indicated increased student performance and enthusiasm about learning. Creative thinking skills, collaborative learning and decision-making all improved. There was increased teacher-student interaction, fewer behavioural problems, enhanced attendance, increased time-on-task and enhanced student commitment to and interest in school.”

Because of the project’s success, Langley Schools is currently seeking funding to equip all of their classrooms with handhelds.

March's T.H.E. Journal published a great article about kindergartners and handhelds. The article “provides a snapshot of a kindergarten classroom in which handhelds were used along with the teacher’s emergent perceptions of the PDA for this age group.” The article includes references to educational handheld research and addresses these three guiding questions:

1. In what ways do kindergartners interact with a PDA?

2. How do they understand the icons represented on the PDA screen?

3. How does the teacher understand the PDA’s potential for her classroom?

Read “Are PDAs Pedagogically Feasible for Young Children” by Drs. Young Mi Change, Laurie Mullen, & Matthew Stuve to examine the age-appropriateness of handhelds in a kindergarten classroom.

You may have gotten a taste of podcasting from David Warlick recently. Pocasting is a great new way to have free audio content delivered to teachers and students! It's still a new technology, so not everything about podcasting is simple. However, I have been subscribing to podcast feeds for a few months now and love it! I have learned so much about learning and technology just by listening to people like David Warlick and Leo Laporte while driving or exercising. Also, I have made podcasts with my students at Willowdale. Check out Radio WillowWeb!

Although the name podcast suggests you need an iPod music player, you don't. Any device that plays MP3 files will work, and that includes Mac, Windows, Palm, and Pocket PC computers! Go to the newest section of learninginhand to learn more about podcasting.

David Warlick, professional learning consultant, has recorded a podcast (an MP3 recording that you can listen to in your browser and/or a portable device that can play digital audio) about the use of handhelds in education. David admits that his view is controversial, but he feels that handhelds are not an ideal learning tool for students. He feels because of screen size and access to information, that laptops or tablet computers are what we should be providing students. Here are some of his words:

Well, I just got a Treo mobile phone, and I'm pretty impressed. I'm actually getting to where I can type pretty well with my thumbs. I agree, these handhelds are an amazing device, that can do many things. They are full computers, with a wealth of software, as is listed on the Learning In Hand web site.

However, it all comes down to one thing for me. If my palm were the ideal size for instructional delivery, then our text books would have been that size all along. Handhelds do have enormous potential in the classroom. But it is not the ideal primary information tool for anyone.

Now I'm making some people mad here, because a lot of educators have invested a lot of time into learning to use Palms and handheld PCs as teaching and learning tools, and I don't want to take anything away from that. They are powerful teaching and learning tools. But if our children are going develop the literacy and knowledge and life-long learning skills that will help them prosper, and help us prosper as well, then they will need a full computer, laptop or what ever the Table PC evolves into.

I have challenged people continually to convince me that ever child in my classroom should have a handheld palm or PC. And it all comes down to one thing, they're affordable or almost affordable (more realistic as Eric says.)

Well, I'm not a realist, I guess. I'm an idealist, and an idealist is someone who knows that reality, today, is what we choose, and we could choose to stop providing only the education that we think we can afford, and choose to provide the education that we know our children need, not only to secure their future, but ours. We need to stop stealing from the future and start investing.

I like my palm too, Eric. But I could live without it. Don't ask me to consider working without my laptop.

If you get a chance, listen to David’s podcast. He makes great points about the importance of teaching contemporary literacy. While my graduate students had a lively discussion after listening to the podcast, it really comes down to this for me: paper and pencil are perfect tools for learning and practicing certain curriculum and skills. Laptop and desktop computers are perfect tools for learning and practicing certain curriculum and skills. Handheld computers are perfect tools for learning and practicing certain curriculum and skills. And there are lots of overlap between these sets of tools. Let’s use the budgets we’re given effectively and use the right tool for the job.

For example, using a big fancy computer to type an essay seems like a menial task for a powerful desktop computer. That computer could be rendering multi-media web pages or used to read and respond to blog posts. I prefer for students to use handhelds when composing paragraphs or essays. Word processors for handhelds don’t have all those options, menus, buttons, toolbars, and pallets that you find in Microsoft Word. Instead, on a handheld, students can focus on the words and sentences that they are writing. Those fancy fonts, colors, and styles aren’t there to get in the way of the task. Yeah, I want to eventually teach students how to deal with those extraneous features of Microsoft Word, but when all I want is for a fourth grader to write a paragraph, I’ll choose the handheld (or even—gasp—paper). Then the computer lab is free for other students to use for perhaps a multimedia project or to respond to emails. And hey, the text composed on the handheld could later be transferred to a PowerPoint, email, blog, wiki, et cetera.

I would love to have laptops for all of my students. That’s not happening anytime soon. And even if I did, I would still want some handhelds around. Try doing the Big Fish–Little Fish simulation or drawing a Sketchy animation on a laptop (you can’t). What do you think? Did David’s comments ruffle your feathers? Add a comment to his website and read what others have to say!

At Willowdale we’ve been dealing with aging Palm m505s and m515s. Some of the handhelds are four years old and they are cranky. The biggest problem seems to be battery issues. Years of charging and discharging the built-in batteries have taken its toll.

To troubleshoot these handhelds, I take the regular steps... First I try a soft reset by poking the back hole with a paperclip. If that doesn’t solve the problem, I do a hard reset by holding down the power button and poking the hole. A hard reset erases all personal data on the handheld and resets it like it was just turned on for the very first time. Luckily, if a hard reset works, then I just perform a HotSync operation and the data is restored. The problem may come back, however. If it does, I do another hard reset. Before synching the handheld again, I go into the user’s backup folder on the desktop computer. You see, everything in that backup folder will be put back on the handheld when you synchronize, and that’s usually a GOOD thing. It’s a bad thing if you keep putting back the troublesome piece of software on the handheld. So, I delete any suspicious files from the backup folder. I also delete the “psysLaunchDB.pdb” file. I’m not exactly sure what this file does, but deleting it before synchronizing an ill handheld that has just been through a hard reset has often solved my problems.

What if a hard reset doesn’t solve your problem? For instance, your handheld just won’t synchronize or it won’t stay on for longer than a few seconds. Then this may be worth a try: drain the battery completely. This can be a challenge because a Palm handheld won’t stay on longer than 3 minutes without use. However, there is a shortcut that keeps the handheld turned on. Start a new Memo and then enter the shortcut stroke (made like a lowercase cursive L). Then enter “.1”. The handheld will then stay on until the battery is completely drained. Doing this resets the battery. After letting the battery drain over night, charge the handheld for at least three hours. Hopefully this fixes your problem. Be aware that this is not healthy for the handheld’s battery – but heck, you’re doing this to an already unhealthy handheld.

Another problem I’m finding has to do with wireless keyboards. Because these keyboards use the infrared port, they tend to interfere with receiving beamed information from other handhelds. Many times the keyboard software turns off the “Beam Receive” setting in Preferences. First, try turning the “Beam Receive” setting back on. Still can’t receive beams? Deactivate the keyboard software. Still no dice? Try performing a soft reset. You may need to check the “Beam Receive” preference after the reset.

Got a problem you need help with? There are resources on the web. Your first stop should be the manufacture’s website, like palmOne.com or hp.com. If you can’t find what you are looking for there, then try a Google search. If you still can’t find solutions, try posting your problem in a handheld discussion forum. Chances are someone can help you out by posting a reply!

No matter how many troubleshooting tricks I may learn, handhelds that have been constantly used by kids for four years may not have much life left in them. Eventually I hope to replace our aging handhelds with brand-spanking new ones. At $180 for a Tungsten E over four years, that’s just $45 per year. Not a bad deal for giving students access to a powerful little computer!

You know how I like to keep you up-to-date with articles on the web about educational handheld use. Here are two short newspaper articles for your enjoyment:

Schools Take Lesson from Video Games in The Flint Journal by Robert Snell, February 24, 2005

PDAs Boost Reading Desire in Parsons Sun by Collen Surridge, February 24, 2005

Update: The Parsons Sun does not archive its articles, so here's some of the text of the article from the Google Cache:

Computers small enough to fit in the palm of your hand are making classic literature more approachable for local middle school students.

The USD 503 school board heard Monday that PDAs - personal digital assistants - at Parsons Middle School are having an impact on students' desires to read.

The school has 20 PDAs and was to receive 10 more today. More are needed, gifted student teacher Lou Martino said. "We've created a monster."

He said he had tried for years to get the highest-end readers to read the classics. When he found out that school librarian Robie Martin had 500 classics on CD ROM that could be read on PDAs, he tried that approach.

"What has happened in the last three weeks is it has snowballed," Martino said.

PDAs were being checked out only to reluctant readers and some gifted students, but word has spread.

"Because of the limited number of PDAs, and the fact students are allowed to check them out for two weeks, we need to find a way to get more PDAs," Martino said.

It's not known if the PDAs are helping with students' understanding and comprehension of the material they read, but the fact that students are excited about reading is "amazing," he said.