Handheld Devices

Your technology director has given you a budget of $10,000 for the purchase of handheld devices in your library. Using the prices in Chapter 5 of Courtney as a general guideline, what would you purchase and why?

With a budget of $10,000 I would invest in devices to be used by both the teachers and the students.
I would use a large part of the budget to buy an MP3 player for each classroom. There are about 20 classes in my school so used that number to go off of. Purchasing a mid-range MP3 player at $300 each would take $6,000 of the budget. I chose to spend so much on these MP3 players because they can be so versatile in the classroom. An MP3 player, such as the iPod Nano can be used to listen to music and other recordings, it can also be used to record and playback material. One MP3 player could easily be turned into an updated reading center. The teacher could record a reading of the books he or she chooses and the students could listen to the reading on the MP3 player while following along with the hard copy. The recording feature could also prove valuable when studying retelling by letting the students act out stories and watching them.
Next I would purchase a PDA for each grade level. 5 of these would cost about $2,500. The PDAs would be for the use of the teachers in the regular testing of the students. Things like letter and number recognition, rhyming, and reading levels can be tested and scored inside the PDAs. Putting the information and tests into the PDAs will save paper and time. Plus, the results of the testing can be transferred to a computer and turned into graphs so the data can be easily read.
Finally, I would use the remaining budget to purchase 5 Internet tablets at $1,500. I would use these in the library and also offer them to be checked out to teachers for use in the classroom. These would be used to teach students how to safely and effectively navigate the Internet. Since only 5 will be purchased I would consider this technology a trial and if the students and teachers feel it is successful we would purchase more at a later date.
I believe these 3 items would benefit both the teachers and the students in the school while bringing more opportunities for experiencing technology into the classroom and library.