THE PA PALM PROJECT

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!