my PDA eWorld

As part of my space E-byte I created an activity to encourage the students to navigate the school grounds on the hunt for space treasure. The students used the Nasa Space Camp website to learn how to take bearings with a compass. They were then sent an e-mail with navigation instructions and directions. Their first task was to transfer these instructions onto the PDA so they were available to each student when we went outside. It was very interesting to see the different ways the student's did this. Some were able to save the attachment in their folder and active sync the instructions on to the PDA, some voice recorded, while others used the transcriber, some sat there waiting for instructions from the teacher! The students were excited and ran outside to find the space treasure! I discovered that the students who had chosen to transcribe the instructions had rushed and mis-typed the instructions so ended up on the wrong side of the oval! The active-sync group decided to take 2 PDAs outside so they were able to view the instructions while using the other PDA to record their answers. The only problem they encountered was the glare of the sun on the screen made it difficult to read the instructions. The students who voice recorded their instructions seemed to have no difficulty and even learnt how to use the Pause button! The students who were waiting for my instructions soon got the idea and joined the other teams. All the groups eventually found space treasure. They then created their own navigation courses and chose to voice re cord or transcribe instructions. At the end of the lesson all results were beamed back to me and appropriate points given.

Over the past few weeks, our team has brainstormed and discussed ideas and developed questions surrounding the development of the PDA Project. We have decided that we need to make a conscious effort to ensure the PDA activities do not remove the teacher from the learning. We are now at the beginning stages of developing our rich learning tasks. What an exciting time!