May 2008 — Features

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Fill 'Er Up

by Rama Ramaswami

Most K-12 administrators likely would have dismissed Atkinson's blog entry out of hand, having spent years trying to keep smartphones and PDAs out of their classrooms. But North Carolina is at the forefront of K-12's new openness to experimenting with bringing handhelds out of lockers and backpacks and using them to enhance traditional classroom instruction. Educators are realizing that it no longer makes sense to fight the near ubiquity of cell phones in the lives of young people. Technology research firm IDC predicts that 81 percent of Americans between the ages of 5 and 24 will own a cell phone by 2010, up from 53 percent five years earlier. And those cell phones will increasingly boast more and more features, including sophisticated computing capabilities. On top of that, the research firm In-Stat reports that smartphone sales over the next five years will outpace those of laptop computers. With numbers like those, it's only smart for K-12 administrators to sit up and take notice.

"There are two ways to think: 'How do you protect the kids from the technology?' Or, 'How do you unlock the creativity of the kids by engaging them with the technology?' If you assume that students will get their hands into the cookie jar, you're thinking about it the wrong way."
-Adam Newman, Outsell

Channeling the iPod

Smartphones belong to the category of "converged" mobile devices, or handhelds that perform a variety of functions combining different technologies. As defined by IDC in its Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, a market intelligence report, converged mobile devices "are capable of synchronizing personal information and/or e-mail with server, desktop, or laptop computers.... Replacing the need to carry a mobile phone and a pen-based handheld or a mobile phone and a pager, for example, these devices may also include an expanding list of features, such as multimedia or e-mail."

Converged devices can download data to local storage and can run applications. Plus, they're compatible with operating systems such as the Palm OS, Windows Mobile 5.0, and the Symbian platform. While smartphones, PDAs, and pocket PCs had different capabilities some years ago, today these devices are so similar that those distinctions have all but vanished.

Certainly, vendors have already tuned in to the K-12 market for converged devices. A few innovative companies are releasing digital learning software tailored specifically for handhelds. Raybook, for example, takes information from well-known publishers such as Wiley and Workman (publishers of CliffsNotes and Brain Quest, respectively) and turns it into unified packages of text, images, audio, and video that a student can use on an iPod-simple to download, uncluttered in design, and easy to view on small screens. While an iPod isn't technically a converged device, it's almost there with the iPod Touch, a touchscreen version that offers WiFi and web-browsing capability.