A Michigan University professor and a team of researchers are developing a suite of educational tools for handheld computers that will be available for downloading at no charge. The tools are expected to be ready by September.

"We're designing and we're building," said Elliot Soloway, professor of education and computer science at the university. "We call it the 'cool dozen' that you've got to have."

Many ed-tech advocates believe that, with their low cost and portability, handheld computers—also called personal digital assistants, or PDAs—hold great promise for schools. But a lack of educational software for handhelds has hampered their deployment in classrooms until now. Soloway and his team aim to change that.

They're creating small software programs for the Palm OS that will allow students and teachers to do essential tasks, such as word processing, sketching, manipulating images, creating timelines and family histories, graphing equations, and printing directly from their PDAs.

"We haven't fixed what the 'cool dozen' will be, but you've got to have them," Soloway said. "They're going to be free, with mass distribution."

Palm Inc. and other companies are helping Soloway and his team develop the software package, though funding comes from the National Science Foundation through an umbrella organization of Michigan University, called Highly Interactive Computing in Education (HiCe).

The business model for selling software doesn't work for schools, Soloway said. Most Palm OS applications have a registration fee, and paying that fee for a classroom full of students for each program can be costly.

Add this cost to software incompatibility problems and the difficulty of loading the software onto a classroom of PDAs, and the concept of handheld computers in schools isn't worth it, he explained.

Soloway and his team of researchers foresee the danger this new technology presents—where schools eagerly purchase a handheld computer for every student and then scramble for software. Such a process would, in fact, mirror how computers entered education.

"We don't want people to get burned again," said Soloway.

But Soloway believes handheld computers will transform educational technology in schools. For as low as $150 each, students can have more computational power in the palms of their hands than ever, he said.

Handheld devices function not only as a computer, but also as a textbook, notebook, and pencil. Students can use the devices to edit and revise their work. Handhelds also hold advantages over traditional computers with their ability to beam data from one device to another. Students can beam questions to teachers, for example, or send parts of an assignment from their own handheld to that of a colleague.

Soloway goes so far as to argue that implementing computers in schools hasn't been successful to date.