TeacherTabletPC

While I have mentioned it before, since Jim Vanides and Matt Faulkner posted reminders recently, I thought probably should too. Given that WIPTE 2007 falls on days when I may not be busy and given how close it is (it’s at Purdue), I am still seriously thinking about attending.

From the WIPTE 2007 site:

Save the Date! WIPTE 2007 will be held on June 11-12, 2007.
WIPTE is open to anyone with an interest in instructional technology. A wide variety of disciplines are embracing Tablet PC’s and similar pen-based devices as tools for the radical enhancement of teaching and learning. This conference is intended to leverage this shared passion and to identify best practices in the educational use of pen-based computing so that all educators may benefit from this next generation of technology.

Thanks to a post on GottaBeMobile.com referring to meeting notes posted at Multi-faceted Refractions, I learned that a group of interested educators met in the north suburbs of Chicago this past week to talk about Tablet PCs and other related technologies.  In poking around there, I found the Illinois Educator’s Tablet PC Roundtable Google group and the page there about the meeting.  Somehow, this all slipped past me and seems to have happened quietly among a group of teachers with no intersection with my own varied professional circles.  Hopefully, this group will lead to greater tablet use in the classroom.

From The Tablet PC Education Blog:

The Google Teacher Academy is a free, one day professional development program designed to help K-12 educators get the most from innovative technologies. Each Academy is an intensive, one-day event where participants get hands-on experience with Google’s free products and other technologies, learn about innovative instructional strategies, receive resources to share with colleagues, and immerse themselves in an innovative corporate environment.

GTA Southern California

May 23, 2007, 8:30am – 7:30pm

Registration

NECC 2007

Mark your calendars, budget, and plan now for the 28th annual National Educational Computing Conference. Join more than 18,000 teachers, technology coordinators, library media specialists, teacher educators, administrators, policy makers, industry representatives, and students from all over the world who’ll gather June 24–27 at the Georgia World Congress Center in the heart of Downtown Atlanta.

The Bolles School in Jacksonville, FL is hosting Tablet PC Institute 2007, April 18-20, 2007. Though it appears that the registration deadline has passed, the site does have a number of examples of Tablet PC use in the classroom:

Faculty Tablet PC Program All of our 150 faculty members have been using the Toshiba Tablet PC in their classrooms. Click here to download a journal viewer and then pick any of the following examples to see what they’ve done. Journal Viewer download Since most of our Tablet software is Microsoft based the examples may not view properly in Netscape. Please switch to Internet Explorer if you find that problem.
What the teachers are saying	Lower School English Review
Document Mark-up	4th grade fractions
Note: The links below are quite large and may take some time to download
Lower School Tablet Movie	Tablet PC in Action
Tablet Case Study	Take a look at the Tablet Features

(as seen in The Tablet PC Education Blog)

Workshop on the Impact of Pen-based Technology on Education (WIPTE) at Purdue University, June 11-12, 2007:

WIPTE is open to anyone with an interest in instructional technology. A wide variety of disciplines are embracing Tablet PC’s and similar pen-based devices as tools for the radical enhancement of teaching and learning. This conference is intended to leverage this shared passion and to identify best practices in the educational use of pen-based computing so that all educators may benefit from this next generation of technology.

I’m thinking this might be really interesting and Purdue is pretty close to Chicago. I think I’ll have to order the monograph from last year’s WIPTE and see what it’s all about.