Do handhelds help learning?
 

Yes
Kate Boyce:
They’ve worked in my classroom

I have had the opportunity to use the handheld computer as an instructional tool with my language arts students and have seen the motivation and success of my students soar. Handheld computers are valuable in encouraging reluctant readers and writers as well as off-task learners. Students who had previously struggled to read two books in a grading period were soon reading six and seven novels using eBooks on their handhelds. Students who normally would have skipped over unfamiliar words began looking up words using the built-in dictionary.

I saw students’ reading abilities flourish; but more importantly, students became more confident in their ability to read. These are great strides because I am confronted daily with students who do not enjoy reading because they don’t feel they are successful. At the end of last school year, we surveyed the students who used the handhelds in my classroom, and 62 percent said they felt that they had become “better readers” because they had the opportunity to read using the handhelds. Many of these students did grow as readers as evidenced by standardized test results. Those who did not make great leaps in their reading scores felt more confident about engaging in reading for enjoyment. This is an educational success that I believe surpasses all others and one that no standardized test can measure.

Students who previously struggled with developing ideas for their writing were soon huddled over their handheld iPAQs and keyboards drafting letters to international pen pals and creating myths for their writing portfolios. Project-based learning took on a whole new meaning as students completed research projects with online access, word processing and a digital camera at their fingertips.

I now assess student progress immediately as students complete online assessments with their handhelds. These assessments provide the student as well as the instructor with immediate feedback on the students’ understanding and daily performance.

When first learning that this technology would be available for every student in my classroom, I was apprehensive about the amount of time that using this technology would take away from our language arts study. However, as I enter my second year using these computers, I am now keenly aware that they are an integral part of the instruction rather than a separate entity.

Immediate access to multiple educational resources facilitates student initiative. I have found the handheld computer to be a valuable instructional tool that fosters both motivation and academic growth in students.

Kate Boyce, a 2001 graduate of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, is a third-year educator teaching language arts at Myrtle Grove Middle School in Wilmington, N.C. 

NO
Jason Higgins:
It’s a lesson in pointless consumerism

Look out, honey, ’cause I’m using technology. Ain’t got time to make no apology.” The specific technology to which musicians Iggy and the Stooges were referring would be difficult to say; but I’ve been in a similar position myself, strong-armed into ushering technology through my classroom and feeling the need to apologize.

Generally, I don’t rail against technological advancements (I’m comfortable around Velcro), just the incessant encouragement of computer use in the classroom. I rail not because I feel that computers are ineffectual or evil, but because in a world increasingly more automated, we seem to encourage the use of computers during the window of each day that for some is the only opportunity for constructive human-to-human interaction—the core of the student-teacher relationship. Of most concern to me are computer technology’s “shotgun wedding” of students to consumerism and the overprescribed outcomes of computer environments.

The public high school where I work is often referred to as “tech magnet,” although the local mall—the cultural epicenter of town—better fits that description. In 2001, the school was involved in an intimate relationship with Compaq; each incoming ninth-grade student was issued a handheld, Internet access computer. Now, two years later, the experiment is over. The already computer-savvy kids played a lot of new games; the less-than-savvy seemed to wallow, turned off of “school,” in the myriad technical difficulties that plagued the system; Compaq received an enormous and invaluable mass of market research. Capitalism, of course, doesn’t provide for cutting-edge technology without corporate sponsorship; and when success in education is aligned with computer accessibility, students begin to believe that playing with ideas—the essence of learning—is more difficult or, worse, impossible without these computer appendages, all available on sale at their local retailers.

I remember a student of mine last year with a cell phone that “went off”—bomb terminology seems appropriate here—as she was arriving to class. “Don’t answer it,” I said.

“But I have to,” she said, with the urgency of a patient awaiting a heart transplant. “I have to!”

Many of these students have unquestionably lost their patience. It was once a virtue. Is it still? Has it somehow become less virtuous than efficiency? It is news to no one that computer and communications technology are now one. Students encouraged to employ these at every available opportunity are never left alone, never left without direct access to “the answer,” never exposed to the value of a conclusion arrived at without prescription. This can be debilitating for developing minds. “Newer is better” and “Everything all the time” are mantras that sit well in “the porches of [the] ears” of Corporate America, but they may poison humanity.

Jason Higgins is an English teacher at River Hill High School in Clarksville, Md. 

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