White River School District

Five staff members volunteered to attend the handheld lessons offered by TIE. In return the LOFTI project pledged support with the necessary handhelds and peripherals they would need to carry out classroom projects.

Since our school uses both MAC and PC machines we opted to buy Palm handhelds. We ordered 5 i705s for the teachers involved in the project and 30 130s for students. Thirty was the magic number for students as that would cover the largest class we had in the group. We also ordered 20 keyboards and two of the VEO cameras. We are in the process of borrowing GPS systems from the Dept. of Technology. I also had four staff people who already were using handhelds purchase upgraded versions. Two of these are now taking the second round of handheld training at Chamberlain.
The palms were purchased through special pricing from CCV software with funding coming through the LOFTI program.

Uses that have been made of the handhelds so far include a government unit on state legislature where the Palms were used to run a mock legislature, to write bills, to vote and to keep track of each bills progress in class and also in Pierre. Special education has been mostly involved in being support for students in the various classrooms. This has involved beaming notes, quizzes and projects to the students for use in the resource room during their time there. In progress are a term paper project in physics class, a vocational agriculture project involving using the VEO camera and the handhelds to do virtual livestock judging and a project dealing with hurricanes that will involve the handhelds in note taking and sharing and also using the GPS systems for plotting.