Gadgets For Tech-Savvy Students
What happened to just buying some notebooks, pens, crayons and a ruler at the start of the school year? These days, kids are requesting some fairly sophisticated, high-tech (and expensive) items to keep them current with their studies. Which ones do they really need - and which items are they just fast-talking you into buying?
The Saturday Early Show turned to Andy Ihnatko, the technology columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, to show us the difference.
iPod
Can an iPod really be considered a back-to-school item? "Well, it's undoubtedly what kids want," said Ihnatko. "And kids can bamboozle their parents into thinking it's actually there to help them learn and is a sensible education expense."
According to Ihnatko, Apple has partnered with a dozen universities to form iTunes U, a whole wing of the iTunes Store where you can download audio and video recordings of college lectures for free. And you can store your files on an iPod as well, using it like a hard drive.
There's also a microphone available, the TuneTalk from Belkin (belkin.com, $65) which lets you record hours of lectures on your iPod. You snap this device to the bottom of your iPod and then you can record hours of lectures and notes right onto the iPod's hard drive, through the device's built-in speakers.
Portable Storage
Students often need a way to take files back and forth from home computers to school computers. A USB flash drive is the least expensive and easiest way for them to do so. The flash drives, which have from 2 to 4 gigs of storage space, can attach to a key chain. Ihnatko recommends flash drives from Kingston (www.kingston.com) and SanDisk (www.sandisk.com). Some flash drives support a standard called "U3," which allows a kid to store not just files, but actual programs on the drive. You plug the drive into any PC and the computer (for all intents and purposes) "becomes" their own machine, with the same applications, files and settings.
Pocket Hard Drive
Better than a flash drive is an actual pocket hard drive. For $139, Iomega's eGO drive (www.iomega.com) buys you 160 gigs of storage that works with PCs or Macs and comes in a sharp-looking little case that's designed to handle abuse. These days, many school projects involve video and photos; they can store their music and video libraries on it, as well.
Upgraded Mouse
Any decent mouse is going to be better than the bar of soap that comes with your Mac or PC. A replacement is more comfortable to hold and usually comes with features like built-in clickers for paging up and down, and function keys that can be mapped to any common function (like switching to your chat client).
Possibly the coolest new mouse is Microsoft's SideWinder gaming mouse, which will be released next month ($79). It has all those features mentioned, plus the buttons are nice and big and easy to find with your fingers. It's optimized for fast-action gaming and it's so configurable that it actually comes with a weight set. (Yes, a weight set.) You can increase the weight of the mouse by as much as 30 grams, to get precisely the "feel" you want. "And they say that American kids don't get enough exercise," said Ihnatko.
Headset
It used to be the only people who wore headsets were busy executives. If you think about it, though, a chat headset is on its way to becoming the mouse of the 21st century. Chat is one of the key applications for kids these days, whether they're on multiplayer games or conferencing with friends and teachers for free via Skype.
So it makes some sense to have a comfortable, high quality headset. Logitech's ClearChat Pro headset (logitech.com, $49) is practical, affordable, and nicely put-together. The sound is crisp and clean and its noise-cancelling circuitry can keep your voice clear when there's lots going on in the room.
Calculator
According to Ihnatko, the Texas Instruments TI-84 Plus (education.ti.com, about $100) is the most awesome calculator ever. He feels that this is the everything device for school. "It's a graphing calculator that lets you 'play' with mathematical functions and see how they work," he explained. It has more than a thousand functions covering nearly any class from high school through college that somehow involves numbers, plus you can download new applications for it anytime you want. Kids can customize it with custom colors and skins, take notes on it with an external keyboard, hook it up to a PC, even do lab experiments with sensor kits. Basically it's a total nerd-out! "My calculator in high school was made of twigs and animal skins compared to this one," he enthused.
Backpacks
A cheap backpack without any padding or balance isn't any good for a kid who carries around 20 pounds of school and sports gear every day. Ihnatko's favorite is the STM's Sports 2 backpack (stmbags.com, about $75). It expands and contracts to hold just a notebook and accessories or a full day's load of books and clothes; it also keeps all the cables and stuff organized, has a pass-through for iPod headphones, and your laptops can survive being tossed and dropped. "And it's so comfortable that the varsity football team can chase you all over the campus and the pack will feel light as a feather," said Ihnatko, a former member of the nerd herd.