Preferences…
Hello I’m Lill, and I’ll be talking about the Preferences option on the Palm main menu. In this area you have three catagories, General, Communication, and Personal. Here are the following options on the Palm Preferences and it’s functions.
In the section General you will find…
Date & Time- In this option, you can set what your location is, your date and time.
Graffiti 2- Graffiti is writing on the Palm with your stilus, not a keboard. In the Graffiti 2 option, you select a letter to tune/change, and check the box if you wish to use the method they give you. If you don’t check the boxes, it indicates that you will use other forms of writing the letter.
Power- This option is for your auto-shut off time, if you want it on while charging, and recieving notes (which is called beaming).
Sounds and Alerts- This is your sound option. You select if you want your sound custom or silent. Under custom, you pick if you want your sound level high, medium, or low. Under the silent, it is all automatically off.
Writing Area- This is the option if you want to write on the screen or not. If you check yes, you will see a check box if you want to see your pen strokes.
Formats- In this option, you can preset the country, change how the time and date is shown, when the week starts, and how your number set-up is.
Keylock- The Keylock option prevents your palm from turning on if you accidentally push a button.
Security- This option is to set a password, set an auto-lock on your Palm, and about your private records.
Touch Screen- Here is were you can calibrate your touch screen with your stilus.
In the section Communication, you will find…
Network- These are your Internet settings.
Connection- In Connection, It will show your “Available Connections”.
Phone- These are your phone applications.
Under the section Personal you will find…
Buttons- In this option you will find the list of buttons on the bottom of the Palm. You can set any program on your Palm to automatically appear when you touch that button.
Owner- Here you write your name and personal info.
Color Theme- This is where you set your color theme (how you want your Palm to look)
ShortCuts- This is where you can set shortcuts for words.
There is also prefrences options for the other programs like Documents To Go and E-Reader. E-Reader is a program where you can read books. (or E-books as there called.) This is all about the Preferences on your Palm. Thanks for reading!
8)Lill8)
Bluetooth
What is Bluetooth? Bluetooth is a communication tool that sends information from one device to another device(s). It has advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are you can “beam” information (like work and games) to multiple people (or one person) without walking out of your desk, beaming information saves paper, keeps student work organized and takes less time. The disadvantages with Bluetooth is when students are writing a test with their Palms they could try to cheat by using Bluetooth to share their work. Teachers can check students’ Palms to see who is on Bluetooth. If a student is on Bluetooth, an icon will appear at the top of the screen. The teacher can tell them to turn Bluetooth off and avoid cheating. Another disadvantage would be if Bluetooth is on, it will drain your batteries quickly so you will have to charge them more often. I recommend to turn off Bluetooth if you’re not using it.
In our classroom we use the beaming tool more than Bluetooth, it is quicker and does the same thing. See yah!
Ashley!
World Clock
If you need to know what time it is in Rome look in your hand and the Palm will have it. The Palm is a great tool for Social Studies classes. With this you can find out what time and date it is anywhere in the world at anytime. How cool is that? You could use this to see time differences in anyplace in the world. I have only used this during free times just to see what people in Tokyo and other places that I like might be doing while I am in class learning. There is one more thing it can do, you can make a new place anywhere in the world and it will show up as a place with a time in that time area. Right now in Social we are creating our own countries, so we could us this tool and it would give us the time, location and coordinates of our made up country. I don’t know if the world clock can do any more than this right now but I will keep exploring!
Lesley 
Another Video
This is a little off the topic of our Palm Project, but the opening sequence of this video sums up what our writing project is like. The rest of the video, with linking and mashing and all the possibilities of Web 2.0, is where we are heading with the connected world and one to one computing.
Palms? Paper? Write!
Students spent the last two weeks before their winter break writing up a storm!!Mr. Mac and I can’t keep up with all the editing!
In order to collect some data that will help us see if we have achieved our project goal we decided to do a control group with the students. They were divided into two groups, we tried to group students according to writing abilities so that they were even amongst each group. For two and a half days one group wrote with paper, while the other used the Palm handhelds. Students were allowed to chose their own topic. Groups switched after two and a half days and used the opposite tool for writing, again choosing their own topic. The third piece of writing was a topic given by the teachers regarding the Palm project and the control group. Students had a choice of which writing tool they wanted to use for this third piece of writing. Four out of twenty six students chose to do their third piece of writing on their Palm handheld. Three of these four switched to the palm because the editing process was quicker on the Palm.
After each day students were asked to journal their experience for the day in order to share their feelings about the Palm handhelds with others that are involved in the project. I also journaled about what I noticed as a teacher during these two weeks. These thoughts will be shared in the final written project.
While students wrote, Mr. Mac and myself edited stories and taught some writing skills. Time was an issue, and fortunately with project funding we were able to team-teach together for 8 afternoons allowing us to collect data necessary for this project. Time has not been on our side and we feel too rushed to effectively assess whether student writing has improved due to the use of the Palms. It is not realistic to accurately show improvement of student writing in a two week period. We do have some samples of student writing from the beginning of the year, however teaching the ‘6 Traits of Writing’ did not occur until January. However, in saying this, we are in the process right now of marking all of these stories using the rubrics from the ‘6 Traits of Writing’ and hopefully we will see some gains in certain areas.
As we continue uses the technology, we are reminded through research and observation that these devices alone will not improve student achievement. It is only through good teaching will we see improvement. Technology is in this case an amplifier.
Winter break is over and Mr. Mac and myself are using the month of March to collect all the data needed to complete our research action project! I guess it is our turn to write up a storm!!
Doc’s to go!
Hello, I am Alex and I will tell you about the Documents To Go software.
What is Documents To Go?
Documents To Go is a feature on the Palm that is a must have for school, you can use it for home work for example to write stories as part of homework. An advantage of “Doc’s To Go” over the regular pen and paper is that is faster if you have a keyboard, which we were really lucky to get. When we first started we didn’t have enough for the class and had to share, but now each of us has our own keyboard which makes writing much quicker. Documents To Go is similar to Microsoft Word, Excel and Power Point programs on the computer but the Palm is portable and you can beam (You have to be really close for this to work) or Bluetooth (You don’t have to be close to each other but in the same room) work to others.
That’s really all, I can say other than spell-check, a feature available on the premium edition of “Docs To Go”, which allows you to check your spelling so there is no need to check a dictionary for spelling.I hope I get a chance to write another one of these!
By Alex 8) 
askbrett.com
After discovering various things on the Palm, I donned the nicknames askBrett.com and Palm I.T guy.
The first thing I discovered was how to send with Bluetooth. I was sitting in science, bored because we were waiting for Mr. McIntosh, I saw a little envelope at the bottom of the screen, so I decided to see what it was, so a little menu appeared with Bluetooth and SMS, I clicked Bluetooth and another menu appeared with Austin’s name, it was highlighted so I had to press ok, then it said sending to Austin then he exclaimed “I just got something from Brett.” So we spend the next half hour figuring out how it worked.
The next thing I discovered was how to flip the E-Reader screen on its side or upside down. I figured how to do that while I was looking through the drop-down menu, when I found display options, it showed three pictures of “writing”, with buttons at the bottom and the top, so I clicked one and it took me back to the book, except it was on it’s side.
The last and definitely the not only thing I discovered was with Documents To Go Premium is you cannot open old Word To Go files. I found out that it open a old story and it didn’t work, so we are currently working on figuring how to open them, because of that I put them all in a separate folder for now. Well that is all I discovered for now you will probably be hearing from in the future.
Yours Truly Brett (grade 
Doing Old Things in New Ways
As a teacher who has always looked for “easy” ways to incorporate technolgy into the classroom, this is as close to a “died and gone to heaven” situation as I have ever been in. The majority of the grade 8 students are regularly using their Palm Handheld Computers daily during Language Arts and Science. The handheld are also being used at times during Math, Social Studies and French. It has been a very easy transition for me to incorporate some basic teaching strategies and lessons using the Palms, and the students are primed and motivated to use the handhelds because they are easy to use and in touch with the students day to day world that exists away from school.
The main focus of this project is to look at how the use of a handheld computer aids in the development of student writing skills. With this in mind, I started with the Six Traits of Writing. (Ideas, Organization, Word Choice, Sentence Fluency, Voice, and Conventions) Doing things the “Old Way” I began with one of my favourite teaching strategies, the brainstorm, and asked students to come up with a list of topics and ideas they thought they could write about. The student generated list was put on the whiteboard for students to copy into a document on their Palm. Following a discussion about broad and narrow topics the students created a personal list by modifying, narrowing and adding new topics. Then the fun with Handhelds began! The students began sharing their lists of writing topics with each other. The students shared their lists by “beaming” their documents to each other. This effectively multilpies the number of topic ideas each student has by the number of students in the room. I don’t think I will hear the words “I don’t know what to write about” for a while!
I have done this brainstorm activity many times while teaching writing, but never has it been so easy for kids to share their ideas with the entire class!
Mr. Mc!
Twelve Days of Christmas
On the Twelfth (and final) Day of Christmas my Tungsten E2 gave to me a Merry Christmas!! By the time you all read this, most of you will have eaten too much turkey, indulged in way too many sweets and hopefully spent a beautiful Christmas holiday with your family and friends! Wishing you many blessings in 2007... Always, Lucy Dalgarno. Here’s hoping you will stay posted to our blog and share your comments with us!
On the Eleventh Day of Christmas my Tungsten E2 gave to me a processed piece of “friendship” cheese!
The purpose of this project is to see if student writing will improve if students have a new tool to write with. However, there are so many other amazing things happening in our classroom since the palm pilots have become a part of our learning. The most important lesson that I have noticed is how the students treat each other. In a world of stereo-types and social standings, our classroom is also affected with labels such as “jocks”, “brains”, “computer geeks” etc. We have been dealing with these issues, trying to teach students to respect each other and make a difference in their world. Since the palms have been here, students who typically wouldn’t “talk” to each other, began talking, sharing knowledge about their hand-held devices, beaming and sharing equipment, working together without rolling their eyes because they chose to work together rather than being told to work with someone outside their “social group”. You are probably wondering what does cheese have to do with any of this. Well, it’s all in the transfer part of learning. It’s one thing to be respectful when you are working with the Tungsten, but when you have Student A offer Student B a piece of cheese during snack time, when Student A rarely has anything to do with Student B, well that piece of cheese moved me to tears! Will Student A become “buddies” with Student B? Probably not, but kindness was shown, respect was given and acceptance is slowing making it’s way into our classroom. Is this all due to the palm pilots? Well, I hope that my constant ” mini-lectures” have had a little to do with it, but I do believe that this little device has made us all step out of our comfort zones, in more ways than one!! Let the growing begin!
On the Tenth Day of Christmas my Tungsten E2 gave to me resources and more resources!
Mr. Mc and I spent the last week before Christmas holidays working on our literature review. I have not written a review like this before and if I did in University, I do not remember! I received many resources from my support team( Tim, Dean and Angus), read many different articles and gained a great deal of knowledge. I must say that learning is much more relevant and easier to grasp when you “want” to understand and learn more about the topic you are studying. This is not some new realization for me, however, a confirmation that whenever we are teaching our students anything, we must make it real and meaningful to their lives in order for them to truly understand. One reason why this project is starting out as well as it has is because students are surrounded with technology in their lives outside of school; to come to school and learn about a new piece of technology was exciting for them and they were motivated to learn and teach me about the things they had learned. I am definitely in the “facilitator” role and together we are exploring, teaching each other and learning from one another. I read my review to them, after a few paragraphs, a few of them became bored, others seemed to be listening and others were actively listening as they sat beside my desk and made comments about what they liked, agreed with or thought I should change. Together we discussed, edited and agreed to ” send”. All in all, it really turned out to be a beautiful lesson!!
On the Ninth Day of Christmas my Tungsten E2 gave to me a surprise, pop quiz!
The students had two quizzes to write. We decided to do one with the hand-held computers and the other with pencil and paper. The first one was completed on the Tungstens. The students needed to share their keyboards, as soon as one would finished he/she would quietly and quickly pass on the keyboard and then play games on the Tungsten. The second test was done on paper. Here are some of things I noticed. With the hand-held computers the students were much more focused and started working immediately. The only talking that occurred was when they handed off the keyboard and even then it was minor in comparison to the talking that occurred during the pencil and paper test. With this test they spoke while they were writing the test, asked more questions out loud rather than putting their hands up. It was just a very different setting. Once they had completed the quizzes they were all busy on their palms. Some were reading from e-books, some were playing games which is better than distracting others that were still writing the tests, but the most surprising part was that I noticed that three boys were typing madly on their keyboards. As I walked past their desks, I asked each of them what they were doing. Two of them were writing stories and one was writing poetry! I must say, this is the first time in a long time, that I have had any student work on writing after a quiz or during free time. These boys could have played games yet chose to write! I was impressed! Wish the palm pilots would have improved their test scores!!
On the Eighth Day of Christmas my Tungsten E2 gave to me, Dean Shareski, our curriculum and instruction consultant for Prairie South School Division #2.
Dean has been a consultant for that last 5 years and he was the one that approached me with the palm pilot project. Without Dean, the students and I would not have had this awesome opportunity! We are very grateful for his support. He visits our classroom, talks to the students about their feelings and experiences with the hand-held computers, shares resources with Mr. Mc. and myself, deals with budget issues and meets with us regularly to discuss progress and build on the project. He is very willing to experiment and try new things, open to challenges and very knowledgeable about technology and education. We met with Mr. Shareski just before the Christmas break. He ordered more keyboards, as we are seeing how the students need them to be more effective with their use of the Tungsten’s. We will meet again in the new year. Thanks for your support and encouragement, Mr. Shareski!!!
