TeacherTabletPC

If you happened to find this site any time yesterday afternoon, you probably caught me in the middle of upgrading to WordPress 2.1 Ella. So far, the differences are mostly small–there are a few plugins I wanted that only worked under 2.1, so I had to upgrade, but I was otherwise fine with 2.0.x. The post editor is probably the biggest difference, though it’s not all that different. The visual/code tab thing works well, autosave is nice, and spellcheck is always a good thing. If you find, as I did, that there are icons missing in the editor after upgrading, clear your browser cache and hopefully all will be resolved. Oh, and if you press Alt+V in IE or Alt+Shift+V in Firefox while in the editor, you get an additional bar of “advanced” buttons.

I’m really hoping that at least a few of the many (I hope) people who are reading this have some experience with Tablet PCs in the classroom and are willing to share. If you fit the bill and want to help write for this site, please email me.

TeacherTabletPC was mentioned in Incremental Blogger on Wednesday and GottaBeMobile.com yesterday, both much more well-read blogs than this. Thanks to Loren and Rob for the mentions.

Both blogs have tons of good stuff. GottaBeMobile.com is Tablet PC and UMPC focused; Incremental Blogger tends to be a bit more on general technology but is also the home of a Firefox Ink Plugin.

Here are some productivity tips from CNET.

(My new plan is to try to post at least once a day, even if I’m just giving a link to something that could be useful.)

I teach mathematics in the Chicago metro area. Last year, a couple of my friends started using TabletPCs in class every day. While I am a big fan of bleeding edge technology in my own life, I am very hesitant when it comes to the latest educational fad, so I mostly sat back and listened to what they said. After hearing about it for a year, I decided it was worth playing with and found myself a B-stock IBM X41 tablet at CDW at the beginning of June.

My tablet has barely left my hands since then. I’ve used it nearly every day in class instead of an overhead or blackboards or whiteboards, predominantly using Journal. As the semester has progressed, I’ve gotten better at using Journal (the kids really enjoy the lasso tool, though I’m not sure why they enjoy it so much) and I’ve gotten into using other tools (VirtualTI is great; writing right on worksheets in Word is fun).

As my school slowly rolls out tablets to many of the other faculty, I am hoping to see increased tablet use in the classroom, at least within my department, and I am hoping that we will find more interesting and effective ways to teach with the tablet.

Welcome to TeacherTabletPC.com!

This site is currently under construction, but we should be up and running soon. Please check back later. Thanks.