TeacherTabletPC

Because of a somewhat spotty^† one-to-one computing pilot, I have a few kids sprinkled here and there with Tablet PCs (they get issued a Toshiba M400). Mostly, they seem to be gravitating toward OneNote, if they use the tablet for note-taking, though I think some may be using Journal.

Most interesting (at least for this post) is that a number of these students have asked if they can email my their homework when it is something that would otherwise be on a sheet of notebook paper or whatnot. Since I have a tablet and can easily grade right on their file (I’ve been asking for Journal files) and email it back, I’ve said yes and so far it seems to be working reasonably well.

I do think it would be at least a little harder to deal with if I had a full class of students emailing me assignments (or even 4-5 class-fulls of students), but I imagine it would be manageable with some creative email addressing and/or subject line requirements and filters. We also have the option of drop-boxes on the network servers, but that has always seemed like more trouble than it’s worth—it takes time to get set up, it’s not necessarily remotely accessible (for me and/or for students), and files may not be as readily associated with specific students (depending on setup).

† (By spotty, I mean that the group(s) of students who have tablets has no relationship to the groups of students that I have in class, so I get one or two here and there with no visible reason or patter from my perspective. I think it may be by humanities teacher or something.)

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.”