Ein Plädoyer für Handhelds in der Primarschule. Das Paper listet die Vorteile von persönlichen Handhelds in der Schule auf, die erstmals dazu führen werden, dass ICT in der Schule auch intensiv genutzt wird. Ein Vergleich mit Notebooks in der Schule und zu überwindende Hindernisse schliessen das Paper ab.

Just around the corner, we can expect to see a growing number of Handheld-centric classrooms. Cathie Norris and Elliot Soloway tell us that these classrooms look more like a knowledge-worker's environment, than a traditional schoolroom. In the Handheld-centric classroom, every student has a handheld computer…and the classroom also offers networked PC's, scanners, cameras, probes, and other technology tools that enable children to work over extended periods of time on a variety of documents, including text, images, tables, graphs, presentations, and more.

While appropriate as an initial focus, it is time that the educational community move beyond an emphasis on 1:1 computing (each child having his/her own personal computer) to a vision of a handheld-centric classroom, where each child not only has his/her own personal, handheld computer, but also has access to networked PCs, probeware, digital cameras, etc. Such a classroom digital infrastructure, we argue, uniquely supports project-based learning, where children can engage in multi-week, multi-media, multi-subject, collaborative efforts. With the rapid emergence of low-cost handheld devices, the realization of this vision--and its associated educational affordances-- is literally possible tomorrow in our children's classrooms. Thus, it is imperative that the educational community engages in extended conversations, now, about the range of teaching and learning opportunities that the handheld-centric classroom makes possible. Our article is a contribution to that discussion.

Cathleen Norris and Elliot Soloway present their vision of a handheld-centric K-12 classroom in this article. As there is some debate on mobile learning in higher education but few concrete projects, this article is reviewed here to illustrate how mobile devices are used in contexts other than higher education. The authors introduce the idea of a handheld-centric classroom to focus attention on the range of devices that could be made available in classrooms (e.g. digital cameras, scanners, projectors). While hardware is considered a solved problem, innovative, usable, and affordable software remains the greatest challenge.
The authors argue that handhelds support project-based learning because the handheld-centric classroom as envisioned provides support for: Artefact creation and easy revision; collaboration by sharing documents; learning in context, that is, using the handheld as an integral part of a learning activity; distributing the teachers' documents; ongoing assessment and teacher-student feedback.
Teachers must be provided with an evolutionary entry path to a new technology; they often recoil at the idea of revolutional changes of their curricula. Learning activities using handhelds can be gradually introduced so there is no need for immediate change in the teachers’ way of teaching. As an example, the authors report that 87% of teachers used a handheld-based simulation in the first year in which they were introduced to it whereas it took the authors four years to get 50% of teachers to use a web-based digital arts library.
One of the main challenges impeding widespread adoption of handhelds is pedagogy. In a handheld-centric classroom, students’ documents should play a central role which implies major changes in curriculum, instructional practices, and assessment. In their concluding remarks, the authors argue that technology will change education this time, even though they acknowledge that such claims have rarely manifested themselves in the past.
While handhelds provide support for the organizational changes necessary, it remains to be seen whether the pedagogical benefits convince enough teachers and schools to adopt this new technology
[from http://www.elearning-reviews.org/].