DPUG - Detroit Palm Users Group

This meeting marked DPUG's 2 year anniversary. We are 420 members strong, and still growing. We're encouraging DPUG members to recruit new members, so that we can reach the 500-member mark.
Our next meeting is May 9, 2002. This meeting will be at Lake Orion High School. We'll be reviewing several software applications next month:
- A review of ListPro software presented by Ken Morse of Ilium Software, Ann Arbor
- A Review of CopyTalk, a subscription dictation service, by Carl Brooks of PalmLoyal.com
- A look at Hacks, by DPUG Member Andrew Hackman and Carl Brooks of PalmLoyal.com.

Meeting Minutes:

Our topic this month was "Palms In Education". We had several guest speakers lined up to discuss how they use Palms in the Classroom:

Michelle Cassidy and Craig Hinshaw from Lessenger Elementary School in Madison Heights discussed their participation in Palm's Ripple Project (see this article in a recent Detroit News, and their "Success Story" on Palm's website), as well as other ways they're using Palms in the classroom. Craig Hinshaw is Lessenger's Art Teacher. He wrote the grant that got Lessenger the Palms. Craig went to a conference in Colorado and first learned of Palms there. Craig will be the first to tell you he is not a techie, but of the 600 grants that were submitted, his was one of 15 that won--in fact he was told that his was the best. His grant detailed a vision of how Palms would be used in the classroom as opposed to just detailing "here's how we'd use DateBook...". Michelle Cassidy, 5th grade teacher, wanted to do more with the Palms then just using them as a digital sketch pad, she wanted to tie the Palms into the 5th grade curriculum. The kids have taken their Palms on various field trips and are using the Palms in a variety of ways. Some details of how the grant was implemented:

The kids are allowed to take their Palms home with them
They must turn their Palms in at the end of the school year
The initial grant was for Palm IIIxe's. The have subsequently received additional moneys and were able to purchase Palm m105s
There are 26 PC's in their Media Center, and each student hot sync's to a unique PC.
The kids use both Graffiti and the on-screen keyboard to enter text into their handhelds.

Some of Michelle's students talked about different things they like to use their Palms for:
- Charles talked about the To Do list
- Peter talked about the Memo Pad
- Michael talked about TealPaint and showed us various sketches he had made on his handheld
- Amber and Sammy talked about Sketchy from the University of Michigan's The Center for Highly Interactive Computing in Education (Hi-Ce). They use Sketchy tto draw animations
The students use several of the different free Palm applications available from the University of Michigan's The Center for Highly Interactive Computing in Education (Hi-CE)
They are looking into IR printing, and looking for appropriate text books and e-books that would be available for the Palm

Ella Modell, Director of Technical Education at Lake Orion High School will discussed how her school uses Palms. She brought one of her students with her, Terry Dolan, who wrote an application for the Palm to help his FIRST Robotics Team capture data about opposing robotics teams. This was a very impressive application that was written in NSBasic, complete with a conduit to allow the data to be exported to a CSV file for graphing.

We watched a short video called " Learning in the Palm of your Hand: Stories from the Classroom" by The Center for Highly Interactive Computing in Education (Hi-CE) . This video is available on their website.

Mike Curtis, U of M Grad Student working at The Center for Highly Interactive Computing in Education discussed Hi-Ce's passion in getting Palms into K-12 classrooms. He reviewed several of the free software applications that they have made available for students, and basically anyone who wants them. The software he reviewed was:

Freewrite - a word-processing program w/spell check. Supports IR printing. If your printer doesn't have an IR port, you can purchase the InfraReady adapter from Bachmann Software. This connects via the parallel port.
Picomap- concept mapping / brainstorming. Can beam and share. Similar to the desktop program "Inspiration".
Sketchy-drawing program that supports animation.
Go 'n tell - works w/palmpix digital camera. Allows you to make a scrapbook, e.g. catalog images and captions.
Fllingit: grabs web site content and sends it to your handheld. No account required, and no hotsync required. Requires a hot sync cradle; doesn't work via IR.

Give Aways:

This month's give aways were all compliments of Handmark:

4 copies of MobileTools
2 copies of GolfTracPRO
1 copy of Monopoly
1 copy of Scrabble

Next Meeting