Teaching and Learning with PDA's

What is a PDA?

PDA's are "personal digital assistants," usually designed to fit in one's pocket, which can store documents, spreadsheets, calendar entries, games, databases, and lots of other resources normally associated with a laptop or desktop computer. The difference is that PDA's are relatively inexpensive and highly portable, and are designed to utilize small, low-bandwidth files and applications.

Some of the add-ons that make PDA's more attractive are collapsable keyboards and other peripherals such as modems, cell phones, MPEG players, digital cameras, GPS devices, and so on. Perhaps the most useful peripheral to students is the keyboard, since it allows students to take notes and construct files easily. Students may beam files such as class notes, images, etc. and applications to one another easily via an infrared port (if they use a mobile PDA), or connect to a network (if they use a wireless or modem-enabled PDA) to share files and access the internet.

A note on PDA internet access: Although PDA's can access the internet, they cannot access all of the same things as a laptop or PC. Rather, because of bandwidth and storage considerations, they must access files especially designed for wireless or mobile users. A short-hand way to think of PDA internet usability is to think of them as text devices. Example: This page is designed to be downloaded to a PDA.

Why use a PDA?

  1. Organization: Combines address book, electronic calendar, notepad, documents, doodle pad, to-do list, diary, secret codes and passwords, alarm clock, timer and more in one small, sortable, searchable device.
  2. Is very easy to use and easy to back up to your PC, and very easy to share data with others via infrared port beaming or the internet.
  3. Can use thousands of applications that allow you to do lots of other things like read and send email, view web pages, documents, spreadsheets, databases, charts and so on.
  4. Can store a lot of text data, such as entire books, and smaller portions of multimedia such as movies, audio and graphics.
  5. Games.
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What we know about PDA's so far:

Kinds of PDA's currently available
The kind of PDA you choose, or that your students choose, will impact the way you use your PDA for teaching and learning. There are dozens of PDA's on the market today. BDABuzz maintains a user-driven review page that gives you the lowdown on the varieties out there.

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How to choose your PDA
Cost and available features for your most common personal needs will be the main determinants in deciding which PDA to purchase. Low-end PDA's usually run about $150, contain two megabytes of memory, and sport grey-scale screens. I think it's worth it to pay the extra $50 for an 8 megabyte device so that you have room for additional applications and files beyond the basics. For another $200-$300 one can acquire color, additional memory and processing power, and other features depending on the brand of PDA. Aside from cost and features,there are two common ways to use a PDA which will affect the PDA you choose: Wireless and mobile.

Wireless means you pay for both a wireless modem (either built-in to the PDA or as an add-on) and a monthly service contract to connect to the WAP-enabled internet anywhere, anytime (provided you are in the service zone).

Mobile means you connect to the internet to update your PDA whenever you hot synch to your PC, or you may use a modem to connect to the internet via an analog land line (telephone line).

There are obviously advantages to being able to connect to the internet directly from your wireless modem-enabled PDA (although services are still limited and slow), but the wireless modem and service charges are quite steep. Modem prices vary; right now (May 11, 2001) OmniSky is offering their $299 modem for free with a paid service contract, but the monthly service can run $40 and up per month. In my experience, analog modems are quite limited in both download rates and services and caused me several OS failures. I returned mine after three days of frustration. I use a WAP cell phone with a little more success.

Palm OS - The dominant PDA brand

While there are a variety of PDA's on the market (notably Windows CE), the majority utilize Palm OS software. "According to PC Data, the Palm OS software market share is at least 90% in the U.S. retail channel (Source: http://www.palmos.com/platform/)."

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Types of Palm OS PDA's:
Palm Handhelds
Handspring's Visor
Sony's Clie
Symbol's SPT 1700 2-D

The near future:
The hot thing on the market today is the "smartphone," which combines the features of a PDA into a cell phone. Two top models in existence are the Kyocera 6035 and the Nokia 9210. Both are brand new releases and will set you back plenty (the Kyocera phone alone is over $500) so I have not yet tried them, and rumours are that there are new products due to be released in fall 2001 that might prove superior. One to watch might be the Microsoft "Stinger."

How PDA's can be used in education:

Rationale: So why would one want to use a PDA to teach? Same reasons one uses a PDA for anything else: Portability, ease of use, relatively low cost, ease of sharing, etc.

Third-party software - quick summary reviews

Handshigh's "ThoughtManager" (http://www.handshigh.com/html/tmteachers.html) allows for the creation of collapsable outlines, which can be surprisingly useful on a PDA.

Iambic Software's Tiny Sheet is a great little software tool that can be synched to Excel on the desktop. Costs about $20

Wordsmith is a reasonably good word processing tool that does bold, center, italics, cut and paste, etc., but doesn't have tabs or tables.

Doc to go includes a pretty good Word and Spreadsheet viewer. Can't edit the spreadsheet and editing the Word document is very slow, and new documents can't be created on the PDA.

QuickOffice has a clumsy spreadsheet and a decent word processor and chart maker but it still can't handle tables or create new documents on the PDA.

AportisDoc lets you read docs ok that have been created elsewhere. A useful feature is the PDF converter - can upload many of the simpler PDF's to the PDA using this tool. Peanut Reader is very similar to AportisDoc, but has no PDF converter.

Avantgo (www.avantgo.com) is very cool - allows you to synch both to channels created especially for PDA's and also to create a custom channel, such as my own web page. Can set the level at which links go - but will slow down hotsynchs. Up and coming competitors include MSN Mobile and Yahoo.

Adobe Palm OS Reader: Allows one to convert PDF files to files which can be read on a PDA (doesn't yet work with advanced PDF features). http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/palmdnld.html


Education-specific uses and testimonials:

Get ready for mobline learning
http://www.learningcircuits.org/2001/feb2001/@work.html

UCompass
http://www.wirelesseducator.com/

East Carolina State
http://www.ecu.edu/itcs/handheld/

East Carolina State study
http://www.ecu.edu/handheld/

What East Carolina has to say about wireless learning:

Benefits
1. Students are able to receive and send their assignments wirelessly through modems and wireless cards with the corridor (backbone) that ECU has established on campus.
2. Instructors have immediate/round-the-clock access to their students.
3. It provides a viable way to manage information technology resources allowing for mobility.
4. Students have an intensive learning environment.
5. There is greater involvement in the class atmosphere and preparation of learning materials.
6. Faculty and staff have become trained on handheld computer devices and wireless technology.
7. There is greater flexibility in when and where assignments are posted and completed.

Cost
In the beginning, there were four faculty members involved as well as three to four staff members. A grant was received to defer some of the initial costs of the program. Handheld devices were provided to the students making their costs minimal. Currently their are three to four staff members in ITCS working on the total project with approximately 800 man-hours devoted to the academic end as well as the technological side. FTE gain has yet to be determined because the project is relatively new.

Project Numina
http://www.computer.org/computer/homepage/march/int_watch/0301.htm

Handheld's "Getting Started"
http://handheldeducation.com/gettingstarted.html

The Educator's Palm
http://educatorspalm.org/palm12/teachlearn/teachlearn.html

Resources

Download sites

http://www.palmgear.com

http://www.tucows.com

http://www.handango.com/