TeacherTabletPC

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.

From The Tablet PC Education Blog:

One-to-One Institute and the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) offer One-to-One Information Resources. The original site (“The Ubiquitous Computing Evaluation Consortium”) was developed by SRI International under a project funded by the National Science Foundation.

I figure it’s just a matter of time before one of my kids gives me this excuse…

The Vermont Slate: My Computer Ate My Homework

The last thing we want to do is put a program in place that causes someone to lose significant amounts of work. The second to last thing is to give kids yet another excuse when they don’t turn in work.

…

So why not just put [automated network backup] on the students’ Tablets and give them the same level of protection that [faculty] always have? Well, one factor is cost, though this could be built into the program or managed in any of several different ways. A bigger issue, I think, is what we are teaching the students. Or, more precisely, what we are not teaching them.

I have not, however, heard anything of a data backup plan from the IT people at my school.

A reader sent me a note about this product, SmudgeGuard, originally designed for lefties, then extended to artists and now Tablet PC users. It looks like it covers the pinky and goes around the wrist, covering the outter edge of one’s hand. The idea is to prevent your hand from smudging your work when you’re writing or drawing with pencil, though the web site also talks about using it to keep from smudging your screen as you write.

I’m not that compulsively neat with my tablet so I’m not sure I’d get it just for that, but being an old overhead projector teacher, my first thought was all my coworkers who perpetually had the blue-green stain on the outter edge of their hand from not-quite-clean transparencies (while I thoroughly bleached my transparencies and never had that problem). I wonder if it would work for wet-erase pens like overhead pens.

Of course, if someone wants to send me one to do a formal review…

Techdirt has had a trio of postings about MySpace relating to education and children in the past few weeks.  I have a strong feeling that none of this is really new, but the new medium of MySpace makes things like this into bigger news than they should be.  And do please note, as cited in the second article, that studies have shown that MySpace is relatively safe (article from EFF).  All this fun stuff aside, I still have no intention of telling my students if I have a MySpace account (or an account on LiveJournal or Facebook or anything of that sort), much less any details of any such account I may or may not have.

Court: There’s No First Amendment Exception In MySpace

Just in case there was any confusion about the matter, a court in Indiana has ruled that the First Amendment applies inside of MySpace just as it does everywhere else. Apparently there was actually some debate about this seemingly obvious question after a court gave a middle school student probation for posting an “expletive-laden” critique of her school’s policies on MySpace. In reversing that sentence, the appellate court noted its abhorrence of the student’s language, but agreed nonetheless that it was protected. It’s really hard to fathom the initial court’s reasoning. There’s nothing in the law to suggest that students have any less of a right to free speech than anyone else, and there’s no reason to think that postings on MySpace would make things any different. However, even though the law is settled on this issue, it’s likely that schools and will continue to go after students, only to be slapped down by higher courts

Studies Say MySpace Safe For Kids, But Don’t Expect Politicians To Care

It’s no secret that MySpace has become a favorite target of politicians looking to demonize the latest threat to children. Since there have been a few instances of MySpace-borne sexual assault, it’s not hard to see why politicians latched on to the site. But, apart from a few cherry-picked examples, it’s not clear that MySpace actually poses any meaningful danger to children. The EFF points to a pair of recent studies that dispute the notion that MySpace represents dangerous territory for children. According to one of them, unwanted online solicitations are actually down since 1999, which would contradict the idea that the rise of sites like MySpace, has been a boon for those that would prey on children. The other study, which looked directly at MySpace found that the vast majority of users have never been the subject of unwelcome advances, and that those who have received them are quite capable of simply ignoring them. Of course, political witch hunts are rarely the result of anything rational, so it’s unlikely that these pesky facts will do much to deter politicians.

High School Principal Sues Students For Phony MySpace Profiles

A high school principal in Pennsylvania has sued four students after they created parody MySpace profiles for him that listed interests such as smoking pot and watching pornography.  …  To his credit (or maybe his lawyer’s) he’s suing the students and not the site itself, which is the proper legal course.

From Jim Vanides:

Ngan Phan, a computer science student at Cal Poly (www.calpoly.edu), is currently doing her Master’s thesis exploring the relationship between tablet-based presentation systems and the needs of students with different learning styles. Do you know any tablet-using college students who could participate in a short survey?

…

The anonymous survey takes about 15 minutes. Students need to have had SOME experience using a Tablet PC, but don’t need to own one or use one exclusively. The students should be college undergraduates.

Here’s the survey (unfortunately, my students are pre-college, so they don’t qualify). Jim has also said that he will post about the results when they become available.

The 2006 Engadget Awards: Vote for Tablet PC of the Year

Now’s your chance to cast your ballot for the 2006 Tablet PC of the Year! (For the purposes of this award, UMPCs will compete in Handhelds.) Our Engadget Awards nominees are listed below, and you’ve got until 11.59PM EST on Sunday, April 15th to file your vote. You can only vote once, so make it count, and may the best tech win! The nominees: Fujitsu P1610, Gateway CX210 / M285, Kohjisha SA1F00, Lenovo X60, and Toshiba Portege M400.

From my perspective, the Fujistu and Kohjisha are out because they don’t use active digitizers and because their screens are too small for my taste, the Gateway is in a big hole for using something other than Wacom Penabled technology, and we’re left with the X60 and M400 and I’ve compared those before.

Go cast your vote!

If you’re a student using a Tablet PC on a regular basis, you might consider writing for The Student Tablet PC—they’re looking for a new author.

If you’re a teacher using a Tablet PC and interested in writing about it, you should get in touch with me.

Hawk Tour is a system to give tours at the Illinois Institute of Technology. From the Hawk Tour web site:

HawkTour is a proof-of-concept application designed to exhibit pervasive computing in a real-world application. HawkTour is context aware which allows it to give tours of the campus center without having a live guide. More than just an application, the real value is in the underlying architecture upon which HawkTour is built as it is extensible to any environment.

HawkTour demonstrates pervasive computing, a technology that radically changes the way we think and deal with computers. Pervasive computing makes computers invisible as it seamlessly integrates computing and networking power into our environment. Using context aware applications, our environment becomes intelligent enough to interact with us in a natural way. Eventually, mundane chores can be done by smart devices letting us be far more productive.

The pervasive computing page on IIT’s Computer Science Department web site talks more about Hawk Tour in the context of pervasive computing in general:

Hawk Tour is a context aware Campus Tour application, a project conducted at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) via an Inter-professional (Ipro) team. It provides Campus information on demand. It runs on PDAs, Tablet PCs, and other mobile devices, and the content can be shown on the digital devices or on a display interface near by. IITour is supported, wirelessly, by a campus wide context-aware middleware. Once it is initiated it will be completely driven by user location and intent. Based on the current location and his/her orientation (or the PDA’s orientation) of a user, it dynamically retrieves necessary campus information and presents it to user through the user-friendly interface. It shows map of the current location and it’s associated campus information, like near room, nearby restroom, Coffee shop, a historic wall, some historic information about the building etc. The key point is, the information are presented to user based on his current location and action are taken based on it’s intent.

Having a location- and/or orientation-aware Tablet PC opens up a wealth of possible applications.