Learning in Hand: Using Plucker in Education

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I found this blog entry at Learning in Hand that describes how two schools in USVI are using Palm handheld devices for student use. Seventh graders at Moravian School are working on a St. Thomas episode their "Our City Podcast". One of the tools they're using to leverage this goal is Plucker!

The handheld are configured and installed with many packages, including Plucker.

The teachers have created simple HTML documents that link to the various Wikipedia entries for each of their "Our City" episodes.

They then used Plucker on their desktop machines to convert that into a Plucker document that can be used on the Plucker Viewer (or alternatively FlingIt) on the handhelds.

Some of the limitations of the handhelds (lack of Wi-Fi) prohibit them from just viewing Wikipedia directly, but having an offline, portable version (in my opinion) has a lot of additional benefits.

Another part of the assignment for students was to find a fact about a city that was left out of that city's episode. Students also looked for any differently-reported facts between the podcast and the Wikipedia articles. If there is a difference, it's an opportunity to explore which source is correct.

Read more on the original blog entry.

It's a great example of how students and other people are using Plucker every day.