PDA's

PDA’s are personal digital assistants which are essentially small handheld computers. They store information, access information and important documents, as well as the internet. Using PDA’s in a classroom could be very effective because they tap into so many unused resources. As a teacher you could be anywhere in the room accessing all your documents, power points, and presentations and be able to present them to the class using your projector. I think student utilization would be another wonderful purpose for them. As students during a lecture or presentation you would have access to the information on the screen in your hands. This would make presentations more interactive.

Online surveys are used to collect data. Online surveys are helpful in the classroom because they give us the opinion of our students as a whole. I think a good time to use them would be after a selected reading passage. Many times students don’t like the readings selected and would have chosen something else. I think that this information would benefit the teacher to see why they made that choice and to help them make a student friendly choice in the next selection. 2 good rules to follow are to be unbiased and to keep your survey length short. Bias is obviously bad, but with lengthy survey students could become uninterested.

I think that technology isn’t used enough in classrooms. Students today have a hard time staying disconnected from their technology through a class, so using it is a great way to keep students focused on the lesson. I can see myself using many forms of technology in my classroom, from online surveys to PDA’s to my personal favorite, an Ereader.

Jonassen, D. Howland, J. Marra, R. M. Crismond, D. (2008). Meaningful Learning With Technology. Upper Saddle River. NJ. Merrill Prentice Hill.