New programs and systems, triumphs and frustrations
When AlphaSmarts first appeared I was intrigued but not impressed. I thought they were limited but had some promising value for whole class work in English and other subjects. As a middle school site technology coordinator I put together a rolling cart of with 30 AlphaSmart keyboards. As expected, it got limited use.
Not long after, a grant program allowed the district purchased new one computer for each teacher and 4 AlphaSmart keyboards for each classroom. At the time I was a county tech mentor and I also presented district staff development workshops. I became the somewhat reluctant AlphaSmart expert. It was hard to champion a cause with such limited appeal. The original AlphaSmarts compounded the usability problems by requiring a buggy ADB to USB adaptor to work with the new USB iMacs.
To this day there are still unused AlphaSmarts in many district classrooms.
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AlphaSmarts, loved 'em. I remember those days. That's when I realized that education was not going to keep up with tech. what I mean was it was clear that some education/tech vendors were use to selling products for higher prices because they thought about the educational market as being a part of the government market and having access to bigger bucks. So, as PC prices dropped, I noticed that ed-tech vendors like AlphaSmart tried to keep their prices up until they were irrelevant to the non-ed-tech audience.
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