TeacherTabletPC

Jim at HP is working on Creating a Software Guide for Tablet-enabled Teaching & Learning—a list of software for use in the classroom with Tablet PCs.

With the help of our HP Technology for Teaching grant recipients, we’ve come up with the following list of software products that one or more faculty member has mentioned. I’ve taken the liberty to sort them by “what you can do with them”, so you’ll see some titles repeating

From the Greenwich Time article “School making use of tablet PCs in classroom”:

Pen and paper were scarce in Jen Donnalley’s classroom Friday at Greenwich Country Day School. The Upper School math teacher saw little need for the materials, even as she wrote down an algebraic equation and asked her eighth graders to solve for “X.”

(I can’t really let it go unmentioned that they probably should have said “solve for x” instead of “X”, though.) It seems that Greenwich Country Day School has been doing the one-to-one computing thing for maybe two years now and this article was looking in particular at their use of DyKnow in the math classroom.

Warner Crocker at GottaBeMobile.com already noted the article and said:

I’ve been impressed with DyKnow’s software since I first heard about it. It sounds like the collaborative capabilities for the classroom are almost too good to be true. Used in combination with a Tablet PC it sounds like a real winner.

Of course, being the curmudgeon that I am, I couldn’t pass up this quote at the end of the original Greenwich Time article:

Headmaster Adam Rohdie said he has been impressed with how the technology has helped, although he qualifies his enthusiasm by saying it is the teacher, not the tool, that really counts.

“There’s no substitute for great teaching. This is another tool to put in the hands of great teachers,” he said. “It’s not technology for technology’s sake.”

How a Blaugh Comic Is Created – With Video! » Drawings & Sketches » Archive

After scanning in the sketch, I import it into Flash on it’s own layer, and then I use my tablet pc to vectorize the final art on the layers above it. Not exactly the traditional vector artist technique, but it works just splendid for me. I have yet to find another vector program out there that can come close to matching the solid drawing tools in Flash. (click here to see video #2)

Steve Myers (Teaching and Learning Economics with Technology) has posted a Comparison of Digital Ink Products, including OneNote and Journal as well as SMART Notebook and others.

Silly though it may be, one of my favorite things about the tablet outside of the classroom is ink blogging and/or chatting with Windows Messenger where I can intersperse doodles and whatnot with the text.