Conference IMCL2007 April 18 -20, 2007 Amman, Jordan 1(14) PDAs in the real world of classrooms – what is needed to help learners think? Howard Nicholas, Wan Ng La Trobe University Key words: handheld computers, thinking, classroom implementation Abstract: In this paper we discuss results obtained from a pilot study conducted with five schools (three primary and two secondary) using handheld computers. The schools were at various stages of confidence in their uses of the technology and had differing levels of support and co-ordination. The paper reports on the results of observations of classes and interviews with teachers and students. Our particular focus is the issues that needed to be addressed across schools and within classrooms in maximising the potential of handheld computers. We report on the issues that the schools confronted and some of the ways in which they attempted to resolve them. 1 Context and background This paper reports on the result of co-operation over some eighteen months between two University-based researchers with staff and students from five different schools in Melbourne, Australia. The research project is a co-operative venture in which the staff from the University provided feedback to the schools based on the experiences observed. For primary aged learners, physical needs are unusually important; computers must be small enough to be held and carried by people with small bodies and small hands. However, they must also be large enough to be able to cope with the lack of fine motor control of young children and sophisticated enough in their software to recognize very non-standard hand- written forms and to cope with rapidly changing demands for different applications within the one task. For older, secondary aged learners, physical needs are less important – though size matters to the extent that screen precision has to be sharp enough to enable it to be read from a number of different angles. Similarly, interactive capacity needs to be large enough to cope with multiple different participants elaborating and correcting ideas. Furthermore, for both teachers and students, more open-ended approaches to education require that there are ways in which students and teachers can co-operate in exploring and changing ideas. This demand means that any tool to support this, such as concept mapping software must be able to respond in flexible ways to accommodate unpredictable and changing links within the concept map while also acknowledging different authors and perspectives. This mix of software and hardware challenges presents an unusual challenge for teachers, who are not in a position to adapt the software and are not easily inclined to stand back from