December 2004 — Exclusive

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Creating and Facilitating a Handheld Users Group

By Judy Hauser, MILS

It all started about four years ago with the Palm IIIc. I was hooked on its beautiful spectrum of colors and the basic applications that it offered. I gradually weaned myself off the Franklin Planner completely and started to use only the handheld. About a year later, I purchased the Palm m515. While it offered the same great colors as the Palm IIIc, it also featured a screen that was easier on my senescent eyes. And remaining loyal to Palm (now palmOne), I upgraded to the Tungsten T model when it was introduced. I am an information consultant for Oakland Schools, the intermediate school district for Oakland County, Mich., which serves 28 public school districts. Oakland Schools provides consultants and support staff in general education, special education, career-focused education, early childhood education, technology, curriculum educational media services and more.

Laying the Groundwork

Many of Oakland Schools' employees have handhelds, and several use them for more than just their basic applications. However, there are also a lot of employees who only use their handhelds for the calendar and address book functions. In January 2003, after several requests from educators in Oakland Schools about handheld use, I decided to start a handheld users group. Other employees in our organization had already provided handheld workshops for customers in our school districts, but I wanted to informally share information with Oakland Schools' employees on how to utilize handhelds for individual, personal and work use. My philosophy is if someone learns to use the handheld for personal use that person will start to use it for work, and vice versa. This idea required some planning, so I asked a colleague who worked with educational technology if she would be willing to co-facilitate these meetings. She wholeheartedly agreed because she was also hooked on handhelds. We got together for some initial brainstorming and planning, and decided that the first item of business was to send out a needs assessment survey to interested people.
But after the third meeting, I found out that my co-facilitator was leaving to go back to teaching in an elementary school. She recommended another colleague who could serve as my co-facilitator. When I asked him, he was very excited about participating. Unfortunately, he quit to go to another organization eight months later, so I'm currently facilitating the meetings alone.

I was lucky, however, that our Technology Services department helped us by creating the needs assessment survey in an electronic format so that we would have the results immediately after someone filled out the form. Questions about preferred time of day and day of week for meetings, level of expertise, type of handheld used, applications used, and interests for other use were asked. The survey ended up being very helpful. Based on survey results, it was decided that the group would meet once a month from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. We were determined to make these meetings useful, fun, interesting and comfortable without taking employees away from their important activities too much. From the get-go, we considered what we were doing to be professional development.
The next step was finding a name for our group. We came up with the name Oakland Schools Handheld Users Group (OSHUG, pronounced "o-s-hug"). Our first group meeting was held in March 2003 and was attended by 14 people. The second meeting attracted 18 attendees, and subsequent meetings have had between nine and 20 attendees.