TeacherTabletPC

Originally, I thought I was going to post about an interesting article.  After a careful read-through, I’m actually posting about an obnoxiously uninformed article and picking apart some parts that I find especially irritating.  This article, Lansing State Journal: Teachers say tech enhances learning, is all hat and no cattle.  I apologize in advance for but this extremely snarky off-topic post.

Kinawa Middle School teacher Josh Coty has a SMART Board.He touches the interactive screen, barely moves a hand along its surface and – voila! – there’s a geometric shape.

“To show this stuff has always been a difficult thing,” the Okemos math teacher said.

Whatever pops up on his computer monitor appears on the SMART Board screen, which makes a visual statement measuring about 3- 1/2 feet tall and 6 feet wide.

I don’t really think showing geometric shapes has always been a difficult thing. In fact, I know of only a small handful of things of that ilk that can be done on a SMART board that can’t be done on an overhead projector.  How exactly a large SMART board makes a “visual statement” much less what that statement might be escapes me entirely.

Morell Boone, dean of Eastern Michigan University’s College of Technology, has a fourth-grade grandchild who already did a PowerPoint presentation for the Chelsea school system.

“Whether we agree with it or not, it’s there,” Boone said of technology.

“We owe it to the children to stay up with what the world is expecting.”

Is it too cynically for me to ask “if the world were expecting our kids to jump off a bridge…”? A PowerPoint presentation is not likely to be an appropriate medium for a fourth-grader.

Haslett Middle School teacher Reid McGuire’s classroom has an interactive white board, Tablet PC and a set of small handheld key pads resembling TV remote controls for immediate feedback from students.

It’s not the same ol’ smart kids answering questions.

“Participation has gone up exponentially,” McGuire said.

“I can get 100 percent participation stress free.”

I really hope this teacher isn’t teaching math, since it’s not possible to have participation go up exponentially in a population of fixed size. Perhaps he meant logistically?

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.

From CENTRAL OHIO SOURCE – The Daily Reporter, Inc.:

While many manufacturers offer extended warranties, they most often do not cover accidental damage or theft, and that’s where Columbus-based Safeware, The Insurance Agency Inc. enters the picture. The company is one of only a few in the nation that specializes in insurance for portable electronic items such as laptops.

…

The firm offers coverage for not only laptops, but also desktop computers, smart phones and the fast-growing segment of tablet PCs, where users can actually write or click on the screen using a pen-like utensil.

“Tablets are becoming very common, especially in the medical field or in construction out on job sites,” Cole [marketing manager for Safeware] said.

…

“A lot of schools are into one-on-one stuff, almost doing away with books, and they have a lot of liability with kids taking (laptops) out of the classrooms. Sometimes you have kids as young as fourth-grade handling them,” Cole said.

Brophy College Prep in Phoenix looks like they have gone to 1:1 computing and are heavily invested in Tablet PCs.  They have a Tablet PC blog on their site, though the level of activity seems fairly low.

TabletPC2.com now has a review of the HP TX1000 Entertainment Tablet PC:

The first thing that comes to mind in terms of the HP tx 1000 is that its fun to use. I can’t put my finger on exactly why its such a pleasure to have around or to use but it is. What I can tell you is that it has a beautiful screen and the best sounding speakers I’ve heard on a tablet pc. Combine that with with all of the easy to use features and it makes it hard to put it down once you start using it. Another interesting thing I couldn’t help but notice was that people using the tx 1000 always seem to have a smile on there face.From the hard core experts at the 2007 Microsoft MVP Global Summit to my friends 3 year old twins everyone who tried this machine enjoyed using it.

Though I’m still living in an XP world, anyone using Vista might be interested in GBM How-To Series #7 : Using Vista Pen Flicks:

Flicks are a new Vista feature that allow you to navigate documents or change data using only your stylus. So you may ask, what’s the difference between a gesture and a flick. There are only eight flicks available. Up, Down, Left, Right, and of course, the four diagonals and they are not bound by the input panel. You can use a flick anywhere on the tablet screen.

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 Five Days of Announcements at Project Honey Pot:

On Thursday, April 26, 2007 at 10:54am in a court in the Eastern District of Virginia, Project Honey Pot filed the largest anti-spam lawsuit ever. Seeking more than $1B in statutory damages, the suit was brought on behalf of our members. It targets a huge swath of spammers. If you’ve harvested email addresses or sent spam in the last two years, chances are you’re on our radar screen and we’re coming after you.

In my various technology reading, this jumped out at me because I’ve been increasingly hearing and reading about the use of online course management tools and particularly Moodle and Blackboard (from Vista is here – wow or whoa?)

Colleges offering online classes over the Internet using Blackboard, a widely distributed e-learning software package, have experienced functionality problems with systems running Vista. Although most of the problems have workarounds or temporary fixes, some academic IT departments are recommending that students and administrators delay installing Vista until the Blackboard issues have been resolved. And while Vista alone can be problematic, there are well-known compatibility problems with Blackboard and student systems that use both Vista and IE7. Many academic IT departments are recommending that students and teachers use an alternative browser, such as FireFox or Opera, which are available as free downloads.

I’d have to strongly recommend using FireFox regardless of any other situation. For the one in a few hundred web sites I visit that doesn’t render properly in FireFox, I have the IETab extension installed so that I can have an IE-rendering tab embedded into FireFox.

GottaBeMobile.com reports that the Lenovo X60 is really available with a Core 2 Duo now (as opposed to last time when it was an error):

So, for $75 more, you can now get a 1.5 ghz Core 2 Duo X60 Tablet PC instead of the 1.66 ghz Core Duo. Rumor has it, though, that Lenovo isn’t too far from announcing their Santa Rosa X60. No dates or anything yet. Stay tuned.