| As
I was driving to class on Thursday afternoon I was thinking about
my new handheld and how excited I was to get to
learn how to use it. I was so deep in my thoughts that I missed the
turn and went right past the school. By the time I got turned around
and waited for several red lights I finally made it to Willowdale.
I was only five minutes late but I felt stupid because after all it
was my responsibility to be the Roving Reporter for the night.
Introductions
were going on as I got settled and everyone told about what Handheld
we had purchased. Some people had gone out and bought a
new one like me while others were using one from their schools. I found
out that the article review, which I already had posted on my blog,
is not due until next Monday. One person had a problem with her handheld
freezing up and Tony told us that if that happens you can run the battery
down, recharge it and then hopefully it will work. We also had a discussion
on Handhelds with cameras. The Zire
72 takes good pictures and video,
which is useful when sending pictures with email but not good for printing.
The
next topic was dinner, which Bridget said was all ready to go in
the teacher’s lounge. We also touched on the Roving Reporter’s
responsibilities. When you email the report send it to Tony as a
Word attachment. Be sure to mention any research and videos and
he will
put links to them. Everyone wondered where the recipe
for Tony’s
world famous chili was.
We had a discussion
on the class website and how to get into our blogs.
Tony told us a great way to bring all
of blogs together. After giving
us step-by-step
instructions we then moved to the computer lab to set up our own
Bloglines account.
Finally it was
time to get into palmOne Basic Skills. We watched a PowerPoint presentation
that gave us a general
overview of how
the
Handhelds work.
It looked at the built in features such as calendar, to do, date
book and memo pad and notes. We just touched briefly on these
features. We plan to explore more of the Handheld as we experience
Digging
Deeper
next week.
Some of the important keys on the Handheld are “Home” which
is a launcher for all programs. If you are ever lost “go
home.” The
soft buttons on the Handheld you can’t feel. The hard buttons
on the Handheld you can feel. To turn the Handheld on either
use the power
button, which usually has a green stripe on it or press any of
the hard buttons.
The time seemed
to fly by and it was time for dinner. Bridget
had prepared a spaghetti bake, which was delicious. We also
had salad,
bread and
my favorite, zebra brownies. Everyone was hungry and in no
time the food
was gone. Thanks for the great dinner Bridget!
After dinner
it was time to settle back and watch our after dinner video: Learning
in Hand: Elementary. In the video third
graders
were using their
handhelds to show how magnets work. I thought it was neat
how involved the children were in the learning in the classroom
with all the
hands on work their teacher, Lynn, had them doing. By this time
I was very anxious to get going on my Handheld. So thankfully I didn’t
have to wait any longer. There are several ways to enter text. They
are: Soft Keyboard, Synchronize Handheld with desktop software,
Infared beaming, Bluetooth, and External Keyboard.
We worked on Graffiti 2, which is one stroke writing. Tony
beamed some of us the program and then we beamed it to each
other so
with in a
few minutes everyone was able to start practicing using the
program. This
took some experimenting to learn how to write the letters
so the Handheld would recognize them.
Tony also beamed us a game called Giraffe. This helps to
improve the skill of writing on the Handheld. The assignment
due Feb
24th is to
play this game and get a score of at least 1400. Show your
score to Tony and
you will receive points toward your final grade.
It was time
for class to be over and so we wrapped things up until next week.
I had a great class and everyone seems
to
be learning
a lot. Graduate
classes like this are so fun and meaningful. Thanks for
teaching us Tony! Keep up the good work! Back |
