Personal Wireless Technologies at Dhahran HS

Personal Wireless Technologies at Dhahran HS

Hey Dorothy, we are not in Kansas any more!

During the 2004-2005 school year, many new personal digital wireless devises have surfaced at school. Of course the most common is the mobile phone, many of which have blue tooth file sharing capability and built in cameras. Small Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) are being used by some faculty and students to do a wide range of tasks including email, web browsing, e-books, music. The iPod music players have become popular this year. Finally laptops and tablet style computers are a common site in the library and common areas. These computers are also wireless and can transfer information from the Internet of from student files on the school server without the need to hook up to any wires. It all comes through the air on the school's wireless network.

The key to understanding why these devises are so useful for a student (and we are all becoming lifelong students) is twofold. They offer ready access to information and can store vast amounts of information.

The age of record players, tape decks, CD players, end even printed books is nearly over. No new mechanical devices will take their place. Books, music, movies and other information can now be obtained from internet libraries and music and video stores, through the air over rapidly developing wireless networks. Even today, while I am standing in the school hallway, I can download an entire novel to my tiny PDA in less time than it takes me to write this paragraph. We see several examples of these technologies in use. The iPod is perhaps the most popular example of this marriage of access and storage. iTunes are downloaded at very reasonable prices and stored in the tiny iPod device. The equivalent of hundreds of music CDs can now be stored in the memory chips in these devices.

This information is stored on high density media such as tiny SD memory cards. The iPod can store hundreds of music albums. The iPAQ PDA can currently store 2GB of information in a tiny SD chip. The 250MB SD memory chip I carry in my pocket contains a small e-book library consisting of eight modern and classic novels and poetry, the complete English version of the Qur'an, the entire new and old testament of the Bible, a dictionary, two music CDs, slide shows of several of our recent trips to Africa, and a movie of our cruise to Tahiti last summer.

A favorite format for the student learner is the "tablet" laptop computer. The machine is smaller and lighter than the regular laptop. It features a screen that rotates and data can be hand written onto the machine. The laptop and the PDA can take handwritten text and efficiently convert it into a font, which can then be printed on a school printer over the WiFi wireless network. The tablet computer has the advantage of being a good productivity tool. PowerPoint presentations, Word documents and Excel spreadsheets are all easy to create on this machine and they hook readily to the classroom projector for project presentation. Another favorite is the Pocket PC computer. The HP iPAQ is an entire wireless computer which fits in a purse or shirt pocket.

If you are thinking of investing in one of these technologies for your student learner, be sure that the machine is "WiFi compatible." Bluetooth will not hook up to the existing 802.11b wireless network. The machine must be able to connect to 802.11b to be fully productive at Dhahren HS.

Heatwave -- May 2005