Week 6: Investigating With Technologies—Blog Posting
Personal Digital Assistants, also known as PDAs, are basically mini hand-held computers. PDAs can be used in many ways in a classroom and more ways are being developed every day. Teachers can use them to distribute information to students, such as lecture notes and class assignments. Some schools are choosing to utilize electronic textbooks and down load them to separate PDAs for each student (For college students this might be a tremendous way to save money!). Students could use the device to write papers and check their spelling, take notes for class, and do research if internet access is available. Students could even work on group projects without having to physically get together by using the communication devices in some PDAs (Jonassen, Howland, Marra, & Crismond, 2008).
Online surveys are a quick inexpensive way to get information to help make informed decisions. We use them to get feedback on different topics to help us know what is happening and how we can make decisions to make things better. For example, a teacher could take a survey on how his/her students feel about different stories and books they have read the first half of the year, and then base the second semester’s readings upon the results of the surveys. The students have more fun and learn more if they are interested so the topics could be geared toward their interests. Teachers can also use online surveys to get input from parents (Dyck, 2001). Sometimes parents have great ideas but do not have time to come to the school and talk with the teacher. If the teacher reaches out to the parents with surveys he/she can gain valuable information to help the students. As well as gaining information for the teacher, it can also be a learning tool for the students. For example, when studying elections in a social studies class, the class could do an online survey, study the information, and make predictions about the elections. One could even use an online survey to hold a mock election or class election, and the students could see democracy in action. Two good rules to following when creating an online survey are to keep the questions simple and easy to understand and to keep the survey short and to the point to keep people from clicking out and not finishing it.
Personal digital assistants are great tools, and it would be wonderful if all students had access to one. As costs come down I feel that they will be used more and more in classrooms. With many cell phones having most of the same capabilities it won’t be long before most students have one, especially at the upper grade levels. Online surveys are a great way for schools and teachers to gain insight to their student body and community. The only drawback of online surveys is making them available to parents who do not have internet access at home. In this day and time, most people think everyone has internet access at home, but unfortunately that is not the case. In conclusion, I guess it would be pretty neat for students to have online surveys for a project and put them in their PDAs, and then they could go out into the community and gather data by doing surveys. When then finished they could use the data they collected to draw conclusions about the projects.
References
Dyck, B. (2001, August 24). 'whassup?' in the classroom. Retrieved from
Jonassesn, D., Howland, J., Marra, R.M., & Crismond, D. (2008).
Meaningingful learning with technology. Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Merrill-Prentiss Hall.
I agree completely with you. PDA's are great and could really be an asset to the classroom as costs come down. I know if I take an online survey and it is too long i wont finish it!
ReplyDelete