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Wireless Uniform

Besides getting to look cool, kids discover that strapping on a wearable computer helps them learn.

School districts across the country are putting wearable computers to use in the classroom, benefiting mainstream and special-needs students. The technology was originally developed for the military, and educators say the wearable computers have made a difference in how children learn and, in some cases, how students feel about themselves.

Assistive Technology Gets a Boost

Jeanne Gides is director of special services of the Coventry, Ohio, school district, and her school district has been testing wearable computers in the classroom for approximately one year.

Assistive technology bridges the gap between the general education curriculum and a particular student's disability, she said.

"In education, one of the most critical pieces of learning is the amount of time you can get a student to stay on task and learn," she said. "With one of the boys, his average time on task during a five-and-a-half-hour school day was 120 minutes without using the wearable. It jumped to an average of 300 minutes a day with using the wearable."

Gides said the student was able to focus better because he enjoyed using the computer.

"With students who have autism or learning disabilities, they like things that are predictable and repetitive and concrete," she said. "They learn well that way."

The small, brick-sized computers weigh approximately one and a half pounds, and can be clipped onto a belt or stowed in a backpack. A flat-panel display is connected to the computer, and a CD-ROM drive can also be attached as a peripheral.

"They're fully functioning PCs, so any software you use on a desktop you can load into the hard drive of the wearable," she said. "Speakers can also be attached, so if a student is using the wearable as a communication device, the speakers are in the backpack and can be clearly heard by other people."

Teachers can load a wide variety of general educational software into the computers, in addition to specialized communication software.

The school uses a picture-based software program that allows the student to press a particular picture, and based on the choice, the computer speaks for the student. One picture prompts the computer to say, "Could I have a ? ," and the other part of the screen is programmed with food selections, like a hamburger or a cheeseburger.

"We put menus on there so when the students go to fast food restaurants, instead of having somebody else order for them, they can march right up to the counter and order for themselves using the computer," she said. "Those are skills that the students have never been able to do."

The wearable computers assist other students with learning disabilities who are placed in mainstream classroom settings in subjects such as social studies or certain science classes.

"They are unable to read the text books, but they can comprehend the information," she said. "We scan the textbook into their wearable computer, so when the rest of the class is reading the textbook, the students with the wearable use a headset, and the text is read to them by the computer."

Wearables in the Field

Though wearable computers show promise in helping students with disabilities, the devices also benefit mainstream students.

Seventh- and eighth-grade students at the Alexandria Country Day School in Alexandria, Va., use the wearable computers as part of the school's FieldQuest Live project.

FieldQuest Live is a three-year-old collaborative distance-learning project involving students in four to six independent schools across the country, said Sherry Ward, Alexandria Country Day School's director of technology.

Students plan, research and present live, interactive webcasts from local venues, Ward said, and teams of students outfitted with wearable computers with wireless modems visit cultural and historical sites.

"We have seventh and eighth graders, primarily, going to local sites of historical or educational interest; developing content about that site, and then returning to the field-trip site to webcast the content they've prepared," she said. "Sometimes they're webcasting that back to their own school, and sometimes they're webcasting to peers from another city or another state."

The site the FieldQuest students webcast from also incorporates interactive features into the students' presentation.

"Recently, we took some seventh graders down to Mt. Vernon, and one of the docents from the pioneer farm spoke, on cell phone, back to our second graders here while the seventh graders were webcasting images back to the school," she said. "The second graders were getting a virtual field trip -- getting audio from the expert on site and getting uploaded images of the farm through the Web site."

Ward said students in a classroom can pose questions, in real time, to the students in the field through a chat room feature on the site or through other options.

"We have a team of students here at school who are kind of the command central," she said. "They man the chat room, and use a cell phone to convey the questions to the on-site team. The questions are either answered by that on-site team via cell phone or over the audio portion of the Web site. The on-site expert, whether that's kids or a docent, is speaking into a cell phone that's part of a conference call, and the visiting schools are entering into that conference call as the source of the audio."

Besides the familiarity with technology that students develop, the impact on students' learning is also important.

Testing Learning

The Coventry School District began testing the wearable computers with four students, Gides said, and the district now has 16 students using the wearable computers. The district is evaluating how the computers help the students.

"We're testing the students' progress in whatever areas of disability that we've identified," she said. "If they have a communication difficulty, we test their progress in expressive communication. We collect data in terms of the number of times they communicate and the quality of their communication using the wearable computer."

She said the district is also evaluating students' progress in learning specific subject areas, such as reading, math, spelling, social studies and science, through using the computers.

Ward said wearable computers introduce an extra element to the students' learning process because students have to think about how they will present the information via a webcast to other students in other states.

"It's a well-known practice of teaching -- to get kids to be the teachers," she said. "If you tutor another student, you've just reinforced it in your own mind. When kids work together, and one of them takes the lead and helps another student along, the leader's learning has also improved.

"If you're just talking about the technology aspect, it's got a world of worth," she said. "When you incorporate that into kids actually creating the content for other kids and taking ownership of their own learning; they're actually learning all the information you'd be trying to cram down their throats in another way," she said. "They're learning it as easy as pie because they're so actively engaged in it."

Schools Face Several Obstacles

Though educators know the benefits of assistive technology like wearable computers, barriers remain in widespread adoption.

"There is a huge need for assistive and educational technology in our schools," said Lynda Van Kuren, spokeswoman of the Council for Exceptional Children, a professional organization for special educators. "Right now, most of the students with autism are still using very low-tech devices."

Educators and schools would like to increase their usage of assistive technology, but it's not easy to do.

"The biggest barrier our schools face is money and knowledge about the technologies that are out there," she said. "To find the correct assistive technology for a student, it takes an entire team of people and it takes people on that team who are familiar with what's available."

Schools are in a bind because of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which says that if technology is essential to a student's ability to progress academically, schools have to provide that technology.

"Our school systems are extremely strapped for funds, both for general education and special education students," she said. "It's hard to make that determination: Is this technology essential for this student?"

Special educators say they face budget problems and a lack of understanding about the technology when trying to implement assistive technologies. The other problem is educating the educators, she said.

"For a lot of our teachers, the schools don't provide a lot of funds for professional development; for teachers to get out to conferences to see what's available," she said. "In larger schools and districts where they have a technology expert, those individuals are going to be much more likely to know what's on the market and what's going to work. They can feed that information to educators in the classroom."

Schools can find ways to obtain assistive technologies for students, she said.

Some companies will allow a student to put a down payment on a particular device to try out the device for one or two months to determine how well it works. Grants are another option, but not all school districts are lucky enough to have a person who knows how to write grants or find funding opportunities.

"Wearables provide promise that we have not had before with assistive technology," she said. "It's very exciting, but the wearables have to be affordable."