Conference Brings Palms to the Classroom

With the National School Boards Association's 14th Annual Technology + Learning Conference going on this week, there have been several announcements about Palm use in schools. The first one was the Palm Education Pioneers program to award grants to teachers to study Palm use in classrooms but there have also been Palm-related announcements from eHomeRoom and Scholastic.

eHomeRoom, an online community for connecting K-12 teachers, parents and students, announced an app, also called eHomeRoom, that lets teachers enter schedules and classroom information for viewing by parents and students via the Web or Palm.Net. Teachers can also add new info using a Palm and update this information wirelessly or by HotSync.

Scholastic Inc., the children's publishing company, has announced its plans to provide educational content for students and planning tools for teachers via Palm handhelds and Palm.Net. Scholastic will provide information and activities from Scholastic.com, their Web site, to help build student learning skills at home and at school.

Scholastic's offerings will include the award-winning News Zone (daily news for children), Best Lessons (daily lesson plans, activities and teaching tips), and an Events Calendar (monthly calendar of upcoming author chats, feature projects and selected booklists to accompany each activity), to be used by teachers and students. In addition, Scholastic and Palm will work together on special learning events where students report from the field on topics such as the presidential election.

Also, back on October, Palm launched its Campus Developer Program which offers Palm-developed curriculum materials at a greatly reduced cost to colleges and high schools teaching students how to develop software for the Palm platform