An inportant m-learning devices: PDA and its potential in education

Personal digital assistants (PDAs) are becoming more and more popular nowadays, especially in business and industry areas. In education area, PDAs are more attractive for the small size, cheap price and powerful function. In education area, PDAs have other advantages, such as light weight, access to information, supporting many learning activities, infrared beaming support, unlimited by time, data transformation, communication abilities, and long time battery support. PDAs can also be improved in the future, such as employ more functions and more convenient to users. Some other aspects that needed to be improved are: PDAs are cheaper than laptop but not cheap enough for all the students. The problem is there is a theft risk for students to use them in schools. PDAs have very powerful functions such as games which may mislead students. In fact, some educators are worrying about PDAs will distract students from studying. Except these, there are also some other potential problems: low computational capability, without printing problems, lack of multimedia displaying problems, inefficient input operation and small screen. Some technical problems may be solved very soon with the development of technology such as low computational capability and inefficient input operation. Some other problems maybe exited all the time with PDAs like the distracting to students.
As Dr. Yuen talked in this article PDAs can be used many ways in education: used as multimedia textbooks with calculator, calendar, notepad and pencil. In fact, PDAs are like school bags to students; help students with organizing and managing time; easy accessing to reference materials; individual centered material managing; and other ways to use in classrooms. PDAs are efficient for students to learn and connect students to learning materials all the time.
PDAs can be used to enhance both teaching and learning. First, on the teaching side, PDAs provide communication opportunities between instructors and students all the time. Whenever students have questions or instructors have information to share, they can contact each other. PDAs make teaching anywhere and any time. Second, on the learning side, PDAs definitely helped students a lot more. Except the advantages that mentioned above, PDAs can do more: students can check assignments, schedule, lecture, and note anytime they need. Furthermore, they can do their assignment through PDAs and turn it in through the PDAs too. PDAs can also help learners to improve the usage of their time, whenever learners have a small piece of time want to study they can access all the materials they need through PDAs. Technologies represented by PDAs are bringing us a new ture of learning revolutionary.
This article is besed on Dr. Yuen's article: Teaching and Learning with Personal Digital Assistants http://dragon.ep.usm.edu/~yuen/teaching/it780/resources/pda-yuen.pdf