TeacherTabletPC

On Monday and Tuesday (well, probably mostly on Monday but with some delays at the receiving dock), I received two ThinkPad X60 units (hi-res screen and Vista Business) and an UltraBase X6 docking station, sent by Lenovo for evaluation.  In the coming weeks, I will be writing more about the X60 and how it compares to my X41 and how I’ve been using it (or not using it) in various situations.  Also, you will soon see some evaluation notes from a university professor on his experience with the X60 having never used a tablet before.

So far, I’ve found:

• Vista and my school’s wireless authentication/encryption infrastructure are not compatible, so no WiFi for me at school.
• Automatic screen rotation is the most immediately accessible “wow” feature.
• While Vista on the X60 is about as fast/slow to start up and shut down as XP on my X41, things like Firefox and Thunderbird seem faster on the X60.

As I’m staring down the barrel of 1:1 computing at my own school, I’m continually intrigued by the various case studies and reports and post-mortems—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Though I am inherently suspicious of case studies presented by the company selling the product under study, Microsoft’s Case Study of Bishop Hartley High School is worth reading. Here’s a snip from early on:

[Ken] Collura [the Director of Technology] didn’t like the classroom scenario of a teacher confronted by the backs of laptop screens, which makes eye-to-eye contact with students difficult and reduces personal interaction in the classroom. Students’ varied typing abilities and keyboarding noises were also considerations. More importantly, laptops did not provide the mobility and ubiquitous access to information Collura wanted for Bishop Hartley students. “The laptop computer requires a place to put it down and type,” he says. “I wanted a tool that would enable one-to-one computing: the idea is that a student could use technology all day everyday, anywhere, anytime, to facilitate learning.”

(originally seen on GottaBeMobile.com, “A Tablet PC Education Success Story”)

The Lenovo Thinkpad x60 won the 2006 Engadget Award for Tablet PC of the Year, both as Readers’ Choice and Editors’ Choice.

I’ll follow the lead of Warner Crocker’s GBM post where I found this and make you go and read the article for the actual tip, since it’s just too cool.   From Vitamin CH:

Jim Norman invited me to speak at his Storyboarding Conference over the weekend. I showed off OneNote and learned quite a bit about storyboarding in general. But the best tip I think I got all weekend was from Jim himself.Jim got his first Tablet PC for a Christmas present. I was excited to see how he was adjusting to it, since he has been admiring my tablets for the whole time we have known each other. Right away, I noticed that Jim had adapted his pen. …

Though I’m still living in the land of XP, I have noticed a good bit of buzz lately about how Vista may or may not affect battery life. GottaBeMobile.com reports that Motion is delaying the Vista LE1700, possible because of battery life issues:

Motion Computing has been informing their partners this week that Vista based LE1700 Tablet PCs will be delayed until July 31. Here is the message that was sent to their partners and also posted in the GottaBeMobile.com forums :

Motion has postponed the shipment of Vista on the LE1700 to July 31, 2007 to allow time for further testing. Recent industry-wide testing of Vista has revealed critical errors that Motion has also observed while running Vista on the Motion LE1700. Although this postponement is very disappointing, Motion has made this decision to ensure a stable Vista environment for our current and future LE1700 customer base.

From CNET News.com:

Some of Microsoft’s most important customers aren’t happy with the battery life offered by notebooks running Windows Vista.

“It’s a little scary,” said John Wozniak, a distinguished technologist in Hewlett-Packard’s notebook engineering department, referring to the work HP needed to do on making Windows Vista more suitable for notebooks.

Brandon Paddock assesses the article, pointing out a critical error:

While I’m the first to agree with the fact that the out-of-the-box power settings are not ideal for my uses, I don’t think the article was particularly fair. For example, they didn’t even bother to cite actual battery life comparisons – nor compare the default power settings from different OEMs.

…

However, there’s a notable error in the article:

The Aero interface is automatically disabled when users put their Vista notebooks into the “power-saving” profile, one of three new simplified power-management states.

That is not correct. Switching to “power-saving” profile will disable transparent glass only when on battery power. That is not the same as disabling Aero by any stretch.

From my perspective at least, the flurry of posts started on GottaBeMobile.com with Rob Bushway’s “Microsoft, lets start an open conversation on Vista and battery life”

Over the next several months, I plan on taking the issues I raised and addressing each with its own focus with the end goal of bringing about positive change in the space. The first issue I’d like to focus on is battery life and Vista.

and continued with Warner Crocker’s “Vista Battery Life Conversation Heats Up”

Rob Bushway’s editorial yesterday about battery life woes for mobile users running Vista has sparked quite a bit of conversation. And as usual on the Internets, some of the talk can get a bit wacky. Apparently one meme in the thread has info reporting that the Aero interface is automatically disabled when users run under “power-saving” mode. As Rob pointed to in an update, Microsoft’s Brandon Paddock weighed in with a rebuttal to that point[.]

I think these are more announcement and pre-release at this point, but here are some links:

Fujitsu Lifebook T4220 Review by LAPTOP Magazine

The new Fujitsu LifeBook T4220 is a travel-friendly, well-rounded convertible Tablet PC that suffers from a few flaws. When it comes to computing horsepower and video quality, the newest addition to the LifeBook line reaps the benefits of Intel’s Next-Generation Centrino Processor Technology (codenamed Santa Rosa), but its battery life left us wanting more.

TabletPCReview.com: Fujitsu Announces T4220 Tablet PC

The LifeBook T4220 is a new edition of the popular T4215 convertible notebook. It is designed for on-the-go mobile professionals who require the flexibility of a tablet for note-taking or navigating through forms-based applications, along with the traditional keyboard input of a notebook.

HP Compaq 2710p laptop – First Look Review – Pocket-lint.co.uk

Being called a lightweight is not want you want to hear in the drinking dens of London, however that’s exactly what HP newly announced HP Compaq 2710p laptop is – lightweight.We got our hands on one at the HP Making Connections summit in Shanghai, so should you be packing this in your bag?

TabletPCReview.com: HP Officially Unveils 2710p Tablet PC

Starting at only 3.6 pounds, the HP Compaq 2710p, ultra-thin convertible tablet sports an innovative design. With a twist of the screen, it transforms from an ultra-light notebook PC into a pen-based tablet. It comes with Mobile Intel GMA X3100 graphics, an optional ultra-slim battery accessory, which allows users to enjoy up to 10 combined hours of battery life, and a convenient ultra-slim docking solution that features an integrated DVD /-RW drive.

In addition, it offers an optional integrated camera for convenient video conferencing and image capture, HP NightLight on the keyboard to improve visibility in low light and integrated business card reader software. The 12.1″ screen has a resolution of 1280×800 and it has an outdoor viewable screen option.

I learned about Notebook Hardware Control (NHC), a free (for non-commercial use, anyway) utility to hardware settings tweaking, in a post in jkOnTheRun:

One of my ‘must-have’ programs on mobile computing devices is Notebook Hardware Control, which we’ve pointed out many times prior. This free application provides a solid tool-set for monitoring or tweaking performance and battery life on a notebook, Tablet PC or UMPC. Previous versions didn’t work too well with Vista since the new OS wasn’t supported, but I’m happy to share the good news: there’s a pre-release version of NHC available that does support Vista right here. Although it’s ‘pre-release’, I’ve used it for the past two days in Vista without any issues. As always YMMV or ‘your mileage may vary’…..

Having just installed it, I can’t give too much of a review, but it certainly gives a lot more information and options than the default WinXP or even the IBM/Lenovo software. So far, so good. I have a strong suspicion that this will be a utility that stays on my tablet.

From a post on Techdirt:

There’s been plenty of talk over the years about how computers will replace textbooks in the classroom and how students will just look stuff up online instead of having to tote around books. A fair number of schools give students laptops, but now, some of those programs are being stopped because they’re not having any positive impact on students’ education. That’s not very hard to believe, since it sounds like many of the programs cited in the original article basically just threw laptops at students, and made very little effort to work them into the curriculum in a meaningful way. [emphasis added] This point has been clear from the outset: simply giving kids computers (or people in developing nations, as with the $100 dollar OLPC) isn’t going to do much. Computers, internet access and other technologies should be seen as useful tools, not silver bullets for education. Making them available is too often seen as a quick fix by politicians and administrators, but not creating some sort of plan around them essentially ensures long-term failure once the shine of being oh-so-high-tech wears off.

The New York Times article linked to by Techdirt was also cited on The Student Tablet PC and Engadget.

From Working in Ed Tech:

One-to-One Institute’s Leslie Wilson did a great job identifying the main pitfalls of a 1:1 and how to avoid them. I heard her speak last week at the Intel Visionary Conference in D.C. She previously organized all the professional development for Michigan’s Freedom to Learn program.

The savvy 1:1 administrator:

• Tells stakeholders why school is pursuing a 1:1
• Provides relevant research (One-to-One offers this)
• Stays well-informed on trends and best practices
• Eats his own dogfood i.e. uses the technology himself
• Stays available and willing to work through issues
• Makes PD a priority each year of the program i.e. budget!!
• Ensures consistent communication with parents
• Chooses relevant assessment metrics and uses rubrics to measure progress each year

I don’t think I’ve ever seen this clear and concise of a list and I’m hoping that people trying to make 1:1 computing happen read this and follow it. The One-to-One Institute looks like it’s got a lot of good resources, too.

You may recall previous mentions of a 1:1 experiment in a grad-level econometrics class (intro, first days, day 3). Steve Myers writes about the last day:

My intent to blog throughout this experience got way laid with the end of the semester pressures from school and elsewhere. The experiment is essentially over and the 8 students in my graduate econometrics course have now completed their last class using DyKnow Vision on their Gateway M285 Tablet PCs. Recall from previous posts that in about the 10th week of classes we assigned to each graduate student exclusive use of a Tablet PC. Overall I think this was a very successful experience and experiment and hope to reproduce it again.

…

Let me go on record as having always opposed laptops in the classroom (including when I was CIO of this university). I thought curriculum had to be bent badly to allow their use and find it ridiculous to see students shove their laptop aside just to take notes on paper. … I am a huge fan of instructor used computers in the classroom and I have used a laptop everyday in every course since 1995 or so. I did so to display my lecture notes and presentations to the students, adding a digital tablet and later the SMART Sympodia, and later yet again I used the Tablet PC so I could digitally whiteboard. But I found no need for students to have laptops in class.

…

In this 1:1 computing and econometrics experience, the success comes from the combination of the Tablet PC and DyKnow Vision. Students have the lecture notes or presentations displayed on their Tablet PCs and they can annotate them and take private notes by typing or with digital ink.