Working with PocketPC (Learning2Go) - part 1

Wolverhampton Local Authority is currently pioneering the use of handheld computers (PDAs) in local schools as part of the Learning2Go project. The project has recently received national recognition in the BECTA ICT in Practice Awards for 2006. As part of our support for Learning2Go, the City Learning Centre has purchased a set of PDAs. (We are currently developing a project with Whitwick Manor, a local National Trust property, to create a PDA trail; see the blog article "This term at the City Learning Centre" for further details).

This is the first of a series of blog articles looking at the use of Pocket PCs. The Local Authority team has worked closely with a number of educational software companies to supply resources for the students, and ongoing training on the use of these resources is provided for teachers in the schools participating in phase 2 of the project - see the Learning2Go website for further details. I do not intend to cover any of the material that has been incorporated into the Learning2Go training sessions.

Instead, what I hope to contribute are a few extra ideas and resources for the use of PDAs in an educational context:

• A look at freeware applications (both general and educational) on PocketPC
• Using FeederReader to read newsfeeds and download podcasts

All of the screenshots in this article come from a FS PocketLoox 720 running PocketPC 2003. For this first article, we will look at a some tools that can make day-to-day operation of a PocketPC more straightforward.

Freeware applications on Pocket PC 2003 - part 1 - Interface Enhancements

Monitoring your battery life - Battery Watch

One of the minor irritations of working with PocketPC 2003 is that there is no direct way to see exactly how much battery life you have left. PDAs use volatile memory so draining the main and back-up battery leads to all data on the device being lost. You can get a graphical estimate of battery-power remaining by clicking onto the clock in the top-right hand corner of the Today Screen, but to get a more accurate reading you have to select Start - Settings - System - Power.

Battery Watch, however, places a permanent indication of remaining power onto the bottom of the Today Screen:

Clicking onto the icon provides quick access to the battery life information:

Download Battery Watch from http://www.birdsoft.biz/batwatch.htm 

Shutting down and restarting your Pocket PC & Closing programs - Shutdown and Magic Button

PDAs are designed to to boot up very quickly, so pressing the power button to turn off the device doesn’t actually close all of the programs currently running; instead it places the device into a form of hibernation mode so that it can be quickly relaunched (part of the reason why the PDA continues to drain power even when it is switched ‘off’). To actually reboot a PDA, you perform what’s called a soft reset, by unscrewing the grip from your stylus and inserting it into the reset hole on the bottom of the device.

A connected issue with PDAs is that closing a program by clicking onto the cross in the top right of its window, doesn’t actually close the program - it is still left running in the memory ready to be reopened quickly later. (If you like, clicking on the cross on a PDA is the equivalent of minimising a program on a desktop PC). To actually close a program on Pocket PC, you use the program called FSCSpeedMenu to remove them from memory. It is very easy to forget that programs aren’t being closed; opening and "closing" a number of programs can quickly swallow up the memory on the device, slowing its operation down.

There are a couple of freeware applications that can help with this: 

Magic Button (http://www.trancreative.com/mb.aspx) makes a Pocket PC behave more like a traditional desktop machine:

When Magic Button is running, clicking on the cross in the top right hand corner of a program window does close it. Every program that is running is also represented by a icon on the top bar, and can be closed from there by holding the stylus down on the icon. To leave a program running but return to the Today Screen, click instead on the "home" icon that is placed on the top bar.

Another useful tool is Shutdown (http://www.freewareppc.com/utilities/shutdownwindowsxpstyle.shtml) which places a Shutdown option onto your Start Menu. Clicking on this gives you a familiar screen:

This may appear to be nothing but a gimmick, until you realise that clicking on "Restart" here actually performs a soft reset of the PDA, removing the need to dismantle your stylus and press it into the reset hole.

These pieces of freeware have a permanent home on my Pocket PC; try them yourself and see if they improve your PDA experience too.

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