Pocket PCs for At-Risk Students

In business we sometimes cross paths with indifferent customers or vendors. Unfortunately, high school teachers encounter such "customers" more frequently than we would like to admit. Failing to engage a student during his or her high school years can not only imperil their hopes of earning a diploma, it can leave them unprepared for the 21st century knowledge-based economy.

The York County School Division in Yorktown, Virginia (http://www.yorkcountyschools.org) examined its data and realized that its school population of 15,000 students had within its numbers a small but significant group of painfully-bored high school students. These students were performing poorly and were at high risk of graduating below potential or not graduating at all.

Technology as a motivating factor

The solution was to create a school so rich with technology that even the most unresponsive 9th or 10th grade student would be inspired and engaged enough to actively participate, complete work, pass classes and go on to earn a diploma. Funded by grants from the state and federal governments, York River Academy of Technology opened up in the fall of 2002 and soon began to implement one of its key technological components: Pocket PCs for every student and teacher in the school.

The mission for this initiative was to covertly help academically at-risk students get a strong education by giving them a handheld computer. To the students the Pocket PCs look "cool"; their teachers hope was that it would help break through their indifference. The Pocket PCs are tactile, sleek, shiny, colorful, powerful, and fun—and students responded. Considering that newly adopted textbooks were priced in some cases at just under $100, a Pocket PC was not an extravagant purchase if it could motivate students who had otherwise begun to write off formal schooling.

The initiative progressed slowly because there were no models to emulate, and the related research available was far from copious. A committee of teachers met and researched which type of handheld was best for meeting the school's objectives. Ultimately, they recommended that the school purchase Pocket PCs instead of Palm handhelds for a variety of reasons. The major reasons included consistency of work environment with the desktop PCs already used in the school, ability to use the Macromedia Flash plug-in for digital animation, and recent decrease in cost per unit, thanks to Dell.

Convincing the school division's Information Services (IS) department that Pocket PCs would not add significantly more work to their already thinly-stretched department was one of the school leadership's biggest challenges. After promising not to mention the "W" word ("wireless") until the school determined if handhelds actually increased student motivation and academic achievement, IS reluctantly signed off on the initiative and the school began issuing purchase orders immediately. Every student, teacher, and administrator was assigned a Dell Axim X5 Pocket PC (http://www.dell.com) for use twenty-four hours per day, seven days a week, all school-year long.

No excuses

A thoughtful strategy to motivate students who often find an excuse—any excuse—to avoid doing work was to spend the grant money in a way that eliminated as many of these as possible.To ensure that students could write prodigiously and avoid Graffiti-input hang-ups, we purchased foldable keyboards from Dell (http://www.dell.com) that permitted easy word processing. To make certain that students could protect and keep track both of their Pocket PC and keyboard, we purchased tough Expedition carrying cases from Grinder Gear (http://www.bagpeddler.com/pda-gg.shtml) that held the components together in a zippered package. The Grinder Gear bagsheld up well to teenage wear-and-tear, were designed with some sense of youthful fashion, and could be stowed or clipped to a book bag. To ensure that input work was hassle free, students used pencil-thick styli were donated by PDA Panache (http://www.pdapanache.com).