“Walk into the main hall at the Convent of the Sacred Heart High School (CSH) in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood on any given Monday morning and you’ll see a huddle of students holding their Palm IIIc PDAs toward a wall-mounted, infrared beaming station. Like bees around a hive, the group is collecting information invisibly.
In fifteen seconds they’ll have downloaded their weekly class schedules, their homework assignments for every class, as well as the school calendar, sports schedule and daily announcements from what they call an 'electronic cubby hole….'
Maggie, a senior, passes a group of ninth-graders in the hall using their Palms, takes a quick look and says, 'I’m soooo jealous of you guys.' It’s the ultimate compliment and an unsolicited validation of coolness….
On the first day of school, the entire freshman class—all 54 of them—were presented with brand new Palm IIIc handheld organizers, instead of Texas Instruments scientific calculators. With an educational discount from Palm, supplemented with funding from CSH, costs for the students’ parents was a wash….” [Design Interact]
Hmmmm… do they have a school library and is the librarian involved in any of this? Inquiring minds want to know! [The Shifted Librarian]