January 2005 — Exclusive
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Life With a Handheld Computer: Confessions of a School Administrator
With handheld and keyboard in hand, you can take notes at meetings, record classroom observations, or keep up with correspondence while away from your desk. Due to the screen size, I find that spreadsheets are less useful on the handheld as you cannot see many rows and columns at once. I do, however, download commonly used spreadsheets such as budget and enrollment data for reference on the run.
PowerPoint is no doubt one of the most used and abused applications in the field of education. Tufte (2003) has an excellent article with details on potential abuse. Tuffte advises that presentations use little text and low-resolution pictures that you can take with your handheld. If you follow this advice your presentations will work on your handheld. With Presenter-to-Go from Margi, you can also project them from your handheld, allowing you to do ad hoc presentations if there is a projector available.
You can also take notes that include freehand writing and sketches with the Note Pad application. In the past, I would grab loose pieces of paper to jot down reminders, telephone numbers, Web sites or ideas. Without organization, such notes are easily lost. With Note Pad, I tap my way from one to another and delete those I no longer need. I had fun with Note Pad at a recent presentation by former astronaut Scott Carpenter, America’s fourth man in space. When I asked for his autograph on my handheld he remarked that my Palm was far more powerful than the computers that guided his spacecraft.
Evidence and Photo Ops
While some handhelds feature built-in cameras, mine required an add-on for picture taking. For about $75, I purchased a handheld camera from Veo that slides into the memory slot of my handheld. As a mobile administrator, there are many times each week when photo opportunities present themselves — some are joyous, while others are problematic. My Veo Palm camera is small enough to wear on the lanyard that holds my ID. It also allows me to capture pictures with little fuss. While the resolution of the pictures is only 640 x 480, it has made my Palm even more useful.
The happier pictures I give to teachers or students as presents and incentives. Not so happy pictures go into my “evidence” folder. This is where I store pictures of vandalism, graffiti and students engaging in less-than desirable behavior. It is one thing to tell a parent that their child fell asleep in my office or hid under a desk. But when I show them a picture, there is little that needs to be said. I also take pictures of situations that need attention from the maintenance department. Within minutes of spotting a problem, I can e-mail a picture to the people who can fix it. This increases the likelihood that help will come soon with the right materials, making the school safer, which should be every administrator’s first priority.
Another surprisingly useful feature is the built-in audio recorder. I record messages to myself while driving or just after a home visit. It is often important that I record details of observations, and now I can do so on the run. I also record students who make inappropriate comments. Sometimes I share them with parents, while other times I play them back so students can hear themselves. When they hear how badly they sound, they usually stop.
