Instead of lugging a laptop to class or trooping to the computer lab, students at Consolidated High School District 230 in Orland Park, Ill., are carrying their computer in the palms of their hand. And after a semester of successfully incorporating the devices into class lessons, the school district plans to expand the program next year. The district's three high schools rolled out 2,200 Palm IIIxe handhelds this fall in what is believed to be the largest experiment of its kind in public schools. Andrew Lech, a freshman at Amos Alonzo Stagg High School , uses the Palm in nearly all of his courses.
Lech writes essays in English class on the handheld and skips the trip to the school media center.
He keeps track of his homework and instantly averages his grades on the device. It's a lot better. Instead of lugging around a dictionary for Spanish class, he uses a translation application for the Palm. In his honors algebra class, he uses the device as a graphing calculator. The sophomore biology classes taught by Laurie Ritchey at Carl Sandburg High School use the Palms to instantly graph data during lab experiments.