Daily Archives: September 23, 2005

One of my favourite tools in my life has to be my Pocket PC. I would highly recommend it to anyone in education as a way of organising and keeping on top of things throughout the school day. In my role as a coordinator here I am not in one location throughout the week so the mobility the PPC affords is excellent.  If you already can run Outlook on your PC at home or at work, then using the basic functions of Calendar, Tasks and Contacts is a cinch. There are reportedly better software packages out there but it came pre-installed and it works so why pay for a third party software package unless you can justify it (or claim it on tax). So it has become my diary and task planner but as Tim Shaw says, "Wait, there's more!" The Windows media player is great as I can upload mp3's and podcasts (also in mp3 form) and listen to them at my leisure with a set of ear buds. The one thing I do think is missing but will be addressed with the introduction of Windows Mobile 5.0 is the lack of Powerpoint support. I've downloaded and currently trialling a program called Pocket Slides but whether I will use this feature enough to justify the cost is still up for debate. I viewed a couple of ppt presentations from Will Richardson which was handy but they were limited when the font was too small and unless you are connected to the Web, the links don't function in a offline format. By the way, the ppts from Weblogg-ed were fantastic - would love to have been there in person to hear Will speak. Bit difficult geographically - I wonder, Will, have you ever been to Australia? Blogs focussing on Web 2.0 have really got me thinking about how I can use my PPC in this capacity and I suppose more tools that have offline / online capabilities will become available. Some tools like Skweezer which re-formats webpages for easy reading are great but still involve me doing a lot of the checking and sending to the PPc via Mobile favourites. Less enthused people might not bother but reading web content offline is a fantastic feature. I can be semi-sociable at home (not totally tied to the home PC to read posts) by reading blogs in the comfort of the lounge chair while my wife enjoys the latest episode of Lost or Boston Public (not many shows about teachers!)and create content that can uploaded later. A good blogging tool for PPC is still to be found so I'll keep looking or be open to suggestions. If I can get Inspiration for Pocket PC then I am pretty well set with a highly powerful tool that enables me to do a lot of stuff that frees me from even the weight and size of a notebook. Not that I'd knock back a Tablet PC if someone offered one to me!