TeacherTabletPC

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.

At least, I hope I’m not a pointy-haired boss, but today’s Dilbert was about blogging…

e-Lab-book.com is a blog about the electronic lab notebook. From the about page at e-Lab-book.com:

This site is a log of my quest for the next step in the evolution of lab science. Scientists have historically been on the cutting edge of technology. However, recently the technology sector has diverged a bit from the ‘lab’ scientist.

Why are we still using pen and paper to record and organize our data?
Why do we write out all our protocols and data by hand?
Why do we then copy stuff into excel for calculations?

The Tablet PC is here and ready to use. It gets better all the time, but is certainly ready to help streamline laboratory science today.

I found out about this relatively new blog from an article on SciScoop.com, which gives some pros and cons to the idea of an electronic lab notebook. You’ll have to read the full article for details, but to summarize—Pros: Templates, Collaborate, Data Access, Organize, Data Backup, Super Calculator, Infinite Colored Pens, Camera; Cons: $$, Write Speed, Battery, Scanning, Chemical Spill!

Mostly, these posts run along the lines of product announcement rather than actual review, but here are some excerpts and links anyway. From my perspective, it’s another convertible that’s just a little heavier than I’m willing to carry around and has the unnecessary internal optical drive.

jkOnTheRun: Gateway announces new Tablet PC- E-155C

I get a lot of early announcements about upcoming products, almost always under embargo until the OEM is ready to have the product officially released. Normally I don’t have a problem honoring those embargoes but this new Convertible Notebook from Gateway is so sweet that I had a hard time keeping this to myself. The new Gateway E-155C Convertible Notebook is a 12 inch widescreen packing, Core 2 Duo spinning, dual digitizing Tablet PC with an internal optical drive. Weighing in at 4.5 pounds the E-155C is light enough to be used in most mobile settings and the powerful hardware components will handle any task with ease.

GottaBeMobile.com – Gateway’s New Convertible Tablet PC: The E155C

With a lot of the Tablet and UMPC world focused on the Intel Developers Conference, Gateway has jumped back into the Tablet PC game with news of the release of its newest Tablet PC, the E155C. We’ve been seeing hints of this for awhile here at GottaBeMobile.com, but now the news is out. The E155C is a Core 2 Duo convertible Tablet PC with an active digitizer and touchscreen capabilities. According to Gateway, “the E155C is designed to compliment Gateway’s desktop-replacement M285 Convertible Notebook.”

Laptops Blog » Gateway released new convertible Tablet PC E-155C (noteworthy much more for the pictures they have than for their minimal text)

Gateway introduced their new Tablet laptop E-155C. This thin and lightweight PC combines the “Tablet” (by allowing to input information using Stylus), and a laptop with a touch screen.

Gateway E-155C is a Thin & Light Convertible notebook : Specs, reviews and prices.

An amalgamation of style and functionality, the Gateway E-155C draws it juice from an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and uses the new Microsoft Windows Vista as its Operating System. One also comes across a a biometric fingerprint reader and Wacom digital pen with digital eraser.

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

The Student Tablet PC has added three new authors: Will, a mech eng student from Australia; Frank, a math student from California; and Robert, a history and archaeology student from Scotland.

Will wasted no time in posting a rundown of tablet hardware released in 2007:

Lots of new tablets have been released in the last 6 months as well as a host of new UMPCs. Every serious notebook manufacturer now has at least one Tablet PC model on the market. This means that there is a lot of choice as well as lots of confusion for the student and consumer. Here is a rundown which is not intended as a review of each but instead a refresh, just to let you know whats out there.

He goes on to summarize the Gateway E-155c, Lenovo Thinkpad X60, Fujitsu LifeBook P1610 and T4125, Toshiba Portege R400, HP TX1000, Motion LE1700, TabletKiosk Sahara i400 series, Fujitsu ST5100 series.

Ubiquitous broadband may not be as out of reach as I’d once thought. Spurred by the death of my mother’s ancient Qualcomm phone, I found myself at a Sprint store yesterday working on getting my parents a new family service plan to try (their current service, as well as mine, is from Verizon, but choices in mobile telecom providers is a whole separate off-topic entry). Somehow, the sales guy talked me into a Novatel U720 USB and a broadband account—attached to a family account and loaded with special discounts, it added a net of something like $30/month to the bill (it’s really more like $50-$60, but there are combination discounts with the other wireless accounts and some percentage discounts for employees of certain companies, etc.). Even at $30/month, I’m not sure it’s something I can justify, but I’ve got thirty days to try it and see if I feel like I can’t live without it. At the moment, though, I’ve got it running in my bedroom, providing me with internet at a slightly slower rate than if I’d just turn on the WiFi in my tablet. The demo machine in the store registered about 1.8 Mbps download and about 200 kbps upload (both about 1/3 of the speed of my home DSL). I’ll have to write more as I actually use it.