PDA Progress

Progress has not been the fastest with the PDAs so far, though that's mainly because my plans for them involve them being able to access the Internet.

Our school is very short of space for sixth form students to do independent study, so my idea was to use our PDAs to allow them to use all the strange little rooms you find in music departments everywhere (practice rooms, even instrument store cupboards!) to access our VLE and the Internet in order to do research. The collection of podcasts I have been working on would then be available for our students to listen to in free periods, anywhere in the department (or in the school!).

Although we have lots of computers, we also have huge classes, so often our keener students turn up hoping to get on a machine, and find that I've got 30 or more younger pupils in there, and every machine has three people in front of it. So a 'take-anywhere' Internet access solution would be ideal as we have four practice rooms and a store room that are empty more often than our main classrooms.

Unfortunately, we don't have any wireless Internet yet, though the equipment is apparently on order. It's always frustrating having to wait for equipment, but on the other hand we are being quite demanding as a department (in a good way!), steaming off ahead asking for all these new technologies, and to be fair the management are humouring us to a very high degree so far!

I have high hopes that we will be accessing the Internet early in 2008, and I will have plenty of evidence to share with you all.

In the meantime, I have been carrying one PDA around with me and thoroughly exploring its capabilities. Moodle (our chosen VLE for the time being) renders fairly well on the small screen, though it can be a bit slow, and scrolling around the screens can be quite tiring. With that in mind, I've taken today off timetable and have recreated some of the resource pages from our 'Music Podcast' course on Moodle in a PDA-friendly version, which I will host on the school's web server when I get back in next week.

The pages are kept extra-simple, with the text from the original Moodle screens presented with only the most basic HTML markup. This should allow the PDAs to display the pages in a much more usable format, and should also speed up page loading times significantly.

Watch this space for more, and if anyone wants to know about how I went about creating the pages, just ask!

Tom

UPDATE: You can see the PDA friendly site here.