JANUARY TRAINING

with Mike Curtis

We were so appreciative of Mike leaving his newborn twin boys to come back and check on our Palm progress here in Nebraska.  Although things may not be as advanced as we previously envisioned, many advancements have been made and some positive learning effects are quickly showing themselves.  Mike spent the first day leading an in-service to the 5th-7th grade teachers in the grant project.  Some of the highlights include:

We should probably create some Troubleshooting guides.  For example…

• Keyboards
  • Home – Keyboard – Wireless Config – Enable Keyboard – Test!
  • Soft Reset
  • Batteries on Keyboard

 Some highlighted apps:

• Pick-a-winner

• IR Notes

• Summing

• EZCalc

• Abacus

• Bin Calc x 2

• Math Ace

PAAM: Teacher logins created.  We enjoyed adding notes to students' handheld documents as well as printing files and deleting apps with just a few quick clicks.  A "pilot" group is going to focus on PAAM in the upcoming weeks and hopefully become experts in the ins and outs to better utilize this administrative tool in the future.

Hi-Ho: Hand-in, Hand-out...an exciting new software to smoothly work with Documents to Go without typical complications.  Not fully released yet, but the demo looked really exciting!

How about these cool tips?

• Positive Reinforcement with SD Cards that are loaded with educational games, etc..

• Student-created instruction manuals, especially when software creators do not provide one.

On January 3rd, our students came back from Christmas vacation and Mike diligently worked on PAAM synchronization issues and other technical difficulties.  His tech support experience and many connections were invaluable as he had most machines (both desktops and handhelds) running efficiently by the end of the long day.

Finally, the morning of January 4th was spent enriching students' learning opportunities with the handhelds by leading them through two very important apps that we are sure to be using extensively in the weeks to come:  Locker and PicoMap.