The Pre-Service Teacher Blog

My family and I just returned home from a 12 day vacation in Walt Disney World. On our way home from Detroit Metro Airport we detoured (to Cleveland!) and added a 10 week old collie puppy, named Kirby, to our family.

Despite some blisters on our toes, we had a fantastic time. The girls really loved their first trip to WDW and they love their puppy. Prior to the trip, My wife signed on to a couple of great sites that really helped up deal with with pre-planning and the crowds which really made our trip more enjoyable. For anyone planning to go I really recommend allearsnet and Tour Guide Mike. Tour Guide Mike gives excellent advice for dealing with the crowds and utilizing the Disney Fast Pass system; the site is really worth the $20.00 cost.

We decided to go laptop free on this trip so I have some catching up to do with emails and so forth.

This application allows "Achievement Certificates" to be beamed to students when they are caught doing something awesome. There are two sides to this application-the Teacher Side and the Student Side. The teacher side allows creation and beaming of Certificates while the student side only recieves and is Read-only. Until a record is beamed from the Teacher application not much is visible on the Student application.

Here are the downloads

Achievement Certificate-Student

Achievement Certificate-Teacher

Here are the screen shots:

I've uploaded the .prc to a permanent download site and updated the original blog download (see below). They other downloads will be updated shortly.

Over the past few days I've been able to test the app with several children. They enjoyed the application, and understood the interface (which I consider to be slightly clunky)in a matter of seconds.

I'm still going ahead with my original plans to update the interface and include an apply section.

Here is a nice article that highlights the work of Cathleen Norris and Elliot Solloway concerning the effectiveness of handhelds.

Research Shows Handheld Computers in Classrooms Enhance Student Achievement

This is the first version of the ChangeCounter. Right now, mark the checkbox of the coin you want to tally and then tap on face of the President. I'm trying to get rid of the checkbox and make it so just tapping on the face of the president tallies the coin amount. I've tested this on a Visor Prism, Tungsten E, Zire 72 and Tungsten E2 with no problems. Here is a screen shot



Here is the download

ChangeCounter

Find your age on other planets based on their orbits around the sun.

Simply input your age and hit calculate.



Hit the apply button to figure other planets orbits in Earth days. If anyone has any other ideas to apply these calculations let me know and I'll attempt to incorporate them in the application.

SpaceAge can be downloaded here:

SpaceAge

Here is a screen shot of the simple Comparison Chart I've created.
It can record 5 traits of 3 different Items. There is a Memo (called Thoughts) attached for recording thoughts and other characteristics not captured in the matrix.

The Comparison Chart can be downloaded from here.

Comparison Chart