Overview: Jennifer Ackels, a classroom teacher at Rose Haggar Elementary, implemented "Handhelds for Small Hands," a Palm handheld project for first graders. By making available a Palm m100 and portable keyboard for her students to use throughout the school day and at home, Jennifer hoped to provide them with an increased opportunity to use technology for enhanced "hands-on." The project goals were: to test computer handhelds as a learning tool for young students; to evaluate the ability of a first grade student to master the new technology; to assess young learners ability to accept the responsibility of using and caring for a dedicated handheld; and to provide increased access to technology as a learning tool. A variety of software to support basic skill mastery in Language Arts and Operational Math was proposed for use by the first grade students.

Implementation: The students and parents eagerly embraced the opportunity to use the Palm handhelds and portable keyboards. The parents of every student in the class agreed to allow their child to participate and use a Palm at school and at home. The parents and students were trained in the basics of using the Palms and taking care of the device.

Jennifer used a VID for large group instruction, introducing and demonstrating the Palm operation and software applications by projecting her Palm on a large screen. The students had no difficulty learning to access programs, organizing their work and setting up the portable keyboards. Several of the students learned to "sync" their Palms independently and were more than happy to assist their classmates in mastering new skills on their Palms. The students used their Palms to practice sentence writing and basic grammar skills, to practice and master spelling vocabulary and to practice math facts (addition and subtraction). Since the first grade students had not developed fine motor skills to facilitate easy use of the stylus for writing, they used their keyboards as the primary input method for written language.

The students took home communications for their parents on a regular basis by writing "sharable" memos with information about homework, class work completed during the day and school activities.

Evaluation: Evaluation of the project was achieved through two methods. The first was teacher observation and monitoring of the students' attitude, motivation, technical progress and academic progress in relation to tasks for which the device was used. The other method was collecting student, parent and teacher feedback through the administration of surveys in May, 2002.

The evaluation of the project revealed that while all of the students were highly motivated to use their Palms, several reported frustration trying to write sentences. The majority of students enjoyed practicing math on their Palms and most of the students thought that using the Palm had helped them in learning their spelling words. Parent feedback offered a wide range of suggestions and comments. Some of the parents were pleased with the opportunity for their child to use "leading edge" technology, while others felt that the applications available for this age were too limited to actually affect academic progress.

Detailed information about the survey results are available.

Barron Elementary School
Frankford Middle School
Plano Senior High School

Return to Palm Project Overview