The challenge: No access and no impactThe sun will rise tomorrow, and computing technology has profoundly changed our daily lives. Two absolute truisms. But one area that has not been touched by the computing revolution is K–12 education: by and large, the K–12 classroom looks and works as it has for the past 250 years. Indeed, except in isolated cases, the impact of computing technology on K–12 over the past 25 years has been, to a fi rst order approximation, zero.

Why? Don’t blame the teachers, society’s favorite scapegoat. No, the reason for the lack of impact is the lack of access. Even today, 2004, the ratio of students to Internet-connected computers is 9:1 in urban settings. Yes, we hear that 98% of U.S. K–12 schools are connected to the Internet, but all that means is that there is at least one connection in the building—and there is no requirement that it work with any consis-tency. Of the 4000 teachers we have surveyed across the country, 65% report that their students use the Internet less than 15 minutes a week! Why? 60% report that they have one or no computer in their classrooms.

Even after spending billions of dollars on technology for K–12, access to computers in U.S. schools is abysmal.

The solution: The handheld-centric classroomFinally, however, the educators in the U.S. have come to the realization that students need 1:1 access—each child needs his/her own personal computer for use 24/7. Politicians, ever willing to exploit a trend, have seized the 1:1 movement and are now pushing Laptop Initiatives in

The Handheld-centric ClassroomComing tomorrow to your neighborhood school

by Cathleen Norris and Elliot Soloway

Fig. 1: Inventor’s Project Template. Matt Dylan’s fi fth-grade teacher beamed this template to all the students in the class.

Fig. 3: Bio in Pocket Word. Matt beamed this bio to fellow students for rounds of peer editing.

Fig. 4: Animation in Sketchy. Matt represented the great Leonardo da Vinci as a shoot-’em-up game. This is the fourth frame of a 50-frame animation.

Dr. Elliot Soloway is the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in the Dept.

of EECS, College of Engineer-ing, School of Information,

and School of Education at the University of Michigan, Ann

Arbor. He is also CEO of GoKnow, Inc. Soloway feels that sleep is overrated.

His e-mail is soloway@Umich.edu.

Dr. Cathleen Norris is a Professor in the Department of Technology

and Cognition at the University of North Texas, Denton, TX. She is also the Chief Education Offi -

cer of GoKnow, Inc., (Ann Arbor, MI) an educational software

company focusing on providing software, curriculum, and professional development in order to make

teachers and students successful in handheld-centric classrooms. Her e-mail is norris@unt.edu.

Fig. 2: Key Accomplishments in PiCoMap of Leonardo da Vinci. Matt chose Leonardo as the inventor for his report and used a concept map to identify key accomplishments.

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their states. In 2001, Maine gave a laptop to each seventh grader. That set off a landslide of me-too-ism with Laptop Initiatives in Michigan, Texas, New Hampshire, New Mexico, etc. (eSchool News, 9/5/2003, “N.H. follows Maine’s lead with school laptop plan.”)

Politicians are in it for the short-term; they are not worried that the laptop model can’t scale. Having the state guarantee funds for only the fi rst of the four-year lease payment on a laptop is not going to sit well with fi scally re-sponsible school administrators. And, unless states are willing to engage in a Ponzi scheme of sig-nifi cant proportions, there is no way to buy new computers in suc-cessive years for the other grades. New Hampshire’s Governor Craig Benson said, “Once the school year is done, the computers will remain in the classroom and not move on to eighth grade with the student. This way we whet their appetite for learning.” While the Governor might well know governing, he certainly doesn’t understand children: taking com-

puters away from the students who have had them for a year will do just the opposite of what the Governor predicts!

Laptop Initiatives are a necessary evil. These programs are way sta-tions on the road to the real answer: Provide each and every one of the 55,000,000 children in America with a personal computer. Low-cost, mobile, handheld computers are the only way to achieve 1:1 in the near term—and that could happen, literally, tomorrow! If the U.S. ordered 55,000,000 handhelds, you’d better believe that manufacturers would produce wireless networked, memory-rich, super-screened devices for about $100 each. It’s mind-boggling to imagine each and every child has their own personal, handheld computer.

In what we call the “handheld-centric classroom,” where each child has a handheld, those one or two computers in the back of the room are no longer teacher-headache makers, but are critically important. They now serve as syncing stations to back up the handhelds, and as Internet sta-tions, where children download reformatted Web pages to their handhelds to be read off-line. Finally, K–12 can leverage the investment in PCs.

It’s raining Pocket PCsUntil November 2002, the only reasonable choice for extremely-cost-conscious public schools was Palm OS devices. But, in a brilliant move, Dell introduced the Axim for $199 and changed the handheld landscape. Today, in fact, a Wi-Fi-equipped Pocket PC is signifi cantly cheaper than a comparably suited-out unit of the Palm OS persuasion. We predict that in the 2004–2005 school year, Pocket PCs will see a growth spurt in schools of Promethean proportions.

While price is no longer holding the Pocket PC back in K–12, there is still the issue of complexity. Readers of this magazine may well see the fl exibility of the Pocket PC as a feature, but K–12 teachers see it as a bug. (Forget what the students think; the teacher is the classroom’s gatekeeper. If the teacher doesn’t like something, the children don’t even get a chance

to see it. So, the goal must be to help the classroom teacher!) To isolate kids from the complexity and fl exibilty of the Pocket PC

operating system, Hi-CE (the University of Michigan’s Center for Highly Interactive Computing in Education, www.pocketpc.hice-dev.org) has created the Pocket Learning Environment (PLE). PLE is a high-level op-erating system (shell) laid on top of the Pocket PC environment. Students “live” in PLE and do their lessons. In fi gures 1-4 we see a fi fth-grade boy’s PLE-based multimedia report on inventor Leonardo da Vinci.

And what will the students do with those Pocket PCs?New technology mimics old technology, for a while, until innovators discover how to do new things with the new technology. Theater was the subject for the fi rst motion picture cameras. It took a while for Hol-lywood to come along and invent a whole new genre of story-telling, called movies, before the capabilities of motion picture cameras were really exploited.

Thus, what schools will see, at least initially, is that the Pocket PCs will be used just like pencil and paper. But that is the good news! In the early days of computing in K–12, we techies preached revolution: “You teachers are going to have to change your entire curriculum to take advantage of these new computers; you are even going to have to learn Basic programming in order to write lessons for your students.” And, of course, it didn’t happen, since teachers did not perceive that the amount of work needed was going to gain them enough benefi t.

With handhelds, in contrast, the mantra is: evolution, not revolu-tion. “Teachers, take your existing curriculum and add some handheld activities.” For example, these days teachers teach students concept mapping—we learned outlining, but that’s so Sixties—as a tool for brainstorming, organizing, identifying key ideas, etc. With Hi-CE’s PiCoMap (www.pocketpc.hice-dev.org/downloads.php), a concept mapping program for the Pocket PC, a teacher can use his/her existing concept mapping lesson—but now, the teacher can have the children beam their concept maps to each other for peer-editing and feedback. Fostering collaboration is big in schools today, and pencil-and-paper concept maps do not lend themselves so easily to such collaborative work, in comparison to a handheld-based concept map.

If a lesson is successful, teachers are much more willing to try using the technology again and even changing their instructional strategies to truly take advantage of the myriad capabilities of handheld comput-ers. Down the road, then, there will be a revolution; but it will happen incrementally, success by success.

Moving to ePencil and ePaperLet’s look out a few years and identify ways in which the capabilities of the Pocket PC can be leveraged to support teaching and learning activi-ties. Here are a few examples to tickle your imagination:

• Participatory Simulations: Simulations, from SimCity to the Inter-net-based Frog Dissection simulation, are productive ways to learn. However, while a learner can fi ddle with parameters, simulations are just one step removed from simply, passively “watching.” Immersing a learner inside the simulation, thereby making the learner more ac-tive, should create a more effective learning environment. Hi-CE’s Cooties (www.pocketpc.hice-dev.org/downloads.php), designed to support a middle school curricular unit on communicable diseases (HIV, STDs etc.), is a participatory simulation in which children learn how diseases are spread. The teacher makes one of the Pocket PCs in a group of six students the carrier, unbeknownst to the students, and then the students “meet” each other by beaming either a germ-laden or germ-free message to each other. (Figs. 5 and 6) Eventually all their devices are infected—and the children need to determine who made them sick. They come to understand that someone they have never met directly, can infect them. Cooties is just the tip of the

Fig. 5: Playing Cooties: Students “meet” each other, exchanging either a germ-laden or a germ-free IR message.

Fig. 6: Two students “playing” Cooties during a curriculum unit on communicable diseases.

© 2004 Thaddeus Computing Inc. Reprinted from Vol 7, No 4, Aug/Sept 2004, Pocket PC magazinePocket PC magazinePocket PCwww.PocketPCmag.com, orders@PocketPCmag.com, 1-800-373-6114, fax: 1-614-472-1879

iceberg; participatory simulations are a new genre of educational software that truly leverages the capabilities of the Pocket PC.

• Collaboration: In 21st-century classrooms, teachers are working hard to help teach children how to collaborate productively. To support this educational goal, Hi-CE has developed Collaborative PiCoMap (CP) that enables learners to share Pocket PC screens and work together synchronously. Instead of a group of children working together on one whiteboard, with CP, each child has a copy of the whiteboard and all the children can make changes at the same time. CP is not intimidating, and we have found in classroom use, all the children in the collaborative group contribute. We are developing an Application Programming Interface (API) that will enable us to add this type of synchronous, screen-sharing collaboration to all applications.

• Video: The “kids these days” want to deal with audio and video—not text—for better or worse. Telling stories, making logical argu-ments, and expressing oneself is still critically important, though. To support learning these skills, we developed a simple video editing tool, PocketVideo, for the Pocket PC that enables children to take video clips with $100 video cameras and tell their stories through video (Fig. 7). As with participatory simulations, we expect to see an explosion of video-based educational software. While we are not trying to make everyone into Stephen Spielberg, multimedia on the Pocket PC will provide new ways to teach and learn.

These applications are technologically demanding: they require consider-able computational power as well as task-appropriate, easy-to-use inter-faces. We at Hi-CE feel the Pocket PC is a good platform on which to construct our next-generation educational applications. That said, we look forward to the maturing of this still-emerging handheld technology.

The revolution in K–12 education is . . . at handThere was a point in time when there was one pencil in a classroom shared by 30 children. When every child was able to have a pencil,

education changed. What the teacher could do with one pencil for 30 children versus 30 pencils for 30 children was profoundly different.

Remember in the late 50s to early 60s when paperback books were introduced? What a boon! The English teacher could require that every child have his or her own personal copy of Beowulf. Instead of trying to share two cop-ies in the classroom, which was a management nightmare and high-ly ineffi cient for learning, a teach-er could assign all children to read the same pages in their own book. Again, education changed.

Tomorrow, every child will have his or her own personal, mobile handheld computer. (It probably will also have cellphone and camera capabilities.) Education will change again. Consider this inevitable scenario: In one year, two years, three at the most, children will come into the classroom, put their handheld computers on their desks, and look up at the teacher. Now what? Will K–12 schools be prepared for this? There is a wonderful irony that something as small a pencil, a book, and now a handheld computer—all things that fi t into the palm of a child’s hand—can revolutionize a monolith such as K–12 education. n

Undergraduates: The Elves of Educational Software

• May 2000: 30 or so University of Michigan undergraduates moved into a 2000- square-foot room equipped with Dell computers for each hand and foot, and Inter-net bandwidth unclogged by MP3 downloads, and created educational applications for the Palm OS and Pocket PC handheld computers.

• May 2004: Over 100,000 downloads later, with contributions from at least another 30 UM undergraduates, Hi-CE is recognized as the leader in providing educational applications for handheld computers for K–12.

While university faculty lust after graduate students to “help” in research, we have found that undergraduates are the true treasure of a university. These young people have just the right amount of technical expertise (data structures are good things; design takes place over lunch; testing is something that others do), just the right temperament (they can sit for hours and hours and hours and program, with breaks only for pizza, pop, and video games), and just the right amount of hubris (sure, we can do that—tonight!).

From Cooties (a participatory simulation that helps children learn how disease spreads) to Fling-It (an uncomfortably-named app that reformats Web pages to fi t on a handheld) to Sketchy (a drawing and animation tool that is already a classic in K–12), with Locker, PiCoMap, youRL, Chemation, BubbleBlasters, etc., in between, the under-graduate software elves at the Center for Highly Interactive Computing in Education (Hi-CE, like the juice) have created a software cornucopia unequaled by any commercial concern. Indeed, their work has spawned an educational company, GoKnow, Inc., based in Ann Arbor.

Words, generated by grad students and faculty, are no longer the only product of a university. Undergraduates, those unpolished gems, are fueling the next revolution in computing with their software creations.

Fig. 7: PocketVideo lets students edit (trim, stitch together, etc.) video clips directly on a Pocket PC.

© 2004 Thaddeus Computing Inc. Reprinted from Vol 7, No 4, Aug/Sept 2004, Pocket PC magazinePocket PC magazinePocket PCwww.PocketPCmag.com, orders@PocketPCmag.com, 1-800-373-6114, fax: 1-614-472-1879

Spotlight On Education