The Alphasmart will not eliminate these problems, but will make it easier to drop the meeting notes into e-mail for sharing or word processing for saving and printing. Better yet, the Athletic Department could have Alphasmarts available for students to use while waiting for practice to begin, or to use for team and individual tutorials. The answer would have to be word processing. In simplest terms, word processing is writing, and the act of writing involves typing, which involves pressing keys on a keyboard so that letters and words appear on a screen and are saved in a document file. As an educator, few things annoy me more than students getting sidetracked in the writing process because they are more concerned with how a document looks than with what it says.
Students waste a lot of time fiddling around with bold and italics and different fonts.
This is time that should be spent on the actual process of writing. The Alphasmart gets rid of all the buttons and knobs that students tend to waste time playing with and strips writing down to its barest essentials. There will be plenty of time to format the text later. I am not going to disagree with the fact that the Alphasmart is not a full computer, and there is certainly a large number of things it cannot do. But for what it does do, and for what it is designed to do, it is truly a remarkable little piece of technology.