Week 6 Blog

                 Personal Digital Assistants, are also called PDA's. It is a mobile device that functions as a personal information manager. Most current PDA's connect to the internet, and have audio capabilities such as portable media players. Smart phones are today's version of a PDA. You can hold them in the palm of your hand, are able to connect to the internet, and its all touch screen. PDA's are able to function as cell phones, fax machines, web browser, and a personal organizer. Personal Digital assistants are more affordable to use within classroom technology budgets and teachers budgets as well. You can use them for all their creative tools or apps that they offer. Teachers are also able to check their email and can have access to the internet. Most students have to go to the computer lab to do most of their work, but computer labs usually limit the students. With PDA's, they are small and light enough to carry around everywhere. You can use these hand held devices in different subject areas. They could be used to chart their nutritional intake and physical activity to see if thy are meeting their fitness goals. Also, you could use them for science, to graph experiments. 


                Some of the reasons that people do online surveys is because they want to get peoples ideas and insight on whatever they are surveying for. Surveys could help teachers in the classroom because it generates students interests, and you learn what students find confusing before they leave the classroom. Surveys can be highly flexible and the teacher can use data for assessment reporting purposes. I think that surveys are designed to have an outreach for participation. They gain insight, demonstrate innovation, and they have a comparative analysis. I think two good rules to keep in mind when writing surveys, would be to keep it short and base it off of your students. There has been several times where I had to take online surveys and didn't understand most of the words listed. Some surveys would take a very long time and by the end of the survey, I was just filling in answers. The first rule of keeping it short would be a good one because, you want students to be honest on their surveys. If you make the survey too long, then you lose the students focus and by the end of the survey they are just randomly selecting an answer. The second rule would be good to have because you want for your students to be interested in what they are having to do. 


                 Technology has opened so many doors for teachers as well as the students. Having a Personal Digital Assistant in the class, allows the students to expand their knowledge instead of being limited in a computer lab. Most students today already own some type of smartphone, so they would already be used to that kind of technology. With online surveys, this allows teachers to receive feedback from their students on what they like and don't like. You could even put online survey s on their PDA's and have a quick survey done in class. Technologies like these, are being used in more schools now because it is very convenient for both the students and the teachers. 


References
Jonassen, D., Howland, J., Marra, R. M. & Grismond, D. (2008)
         Pearson, Merrill/Prentice Hall, 3rd edition