TeacherTabletPC

The Rogersville Review in Hawkins County, TN reported that the school there is sending back a large number of Gateway Tablet PCs:

City school board members voted Tuesday to return the laptop computers, which have not yet been distributed to students, and terminate the lease agreement because of the company’s inability to provide maintenance as specified in the contract.

It’s good to see that at least some people take quality of service seriously. The last time I dealt with Gateway was way back in 1995, right when they first became big and couldn’t handle the increased volume of production, much less the increased customer service load. I have been hearing good things about their tablets, though.

Since I already posted about the upgrade to WP2.1 this week, I thought I might as well post a list of the plugins I’m using. This should automatically update, since (as listed below) I’m using WP-Plugin List.

• Akismet v2.5.1
  Used by millions, Akismet is quite possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from comment and track-back spam. It keeps your site protected from spam even while you sleep. To get started: 1) Click the “Activate” link to the left of this description, 2) Sign up for an Akismet API key, and 3) Go to your Akismet configuration page, and save your API key. Automattic
• Bad Behavior v2.0.38
  Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site. Michael Hampton
• Future Calendar v1.6.2
  A simple plugin that utilizes a modified get_calendar function that shows what dates have a future post scheduled in a calendar format, and makes it easy to change the current timestamp. Includes a widget to display posts on your website. Aaron Harun
• Linkblock widget v1.0
  Displays one specific category of links; up to 9 instances of this widget may exist. Heavily derived from the Text widget code included with the widget plugin by Automattic, Inc. M. Holger
• LiveContact v0.9b
  A warm and fuzzy Web 2.0 contact form John Wyles
• Feedburner Feed Replacement v2.2
  Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while letting through some important User-Agents. Steve Smith
• Permalink Redirect v1.0.1
  Redirects all crap away from the end of the URL Joost de Valk
• Role Manager v2.0.0
  Role Management for WordPress 2.0.x and 2.1.. Thomas Schneider
• Janrain Engage v1.0.1
  Plugin to add authentication via the Janrain Engage service. forestb
• Sociable v3.5.2
  Automatically add links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites. Blogplay
• WordPress.com Stats v1.7.5
  Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key. Automattic
• Google Sitemaps v2.7.1
  This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. Arne Brachhold
• Sociallist v1.5.1
  Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking service. Go to Options -> Sociallist for setup. Codemaster
• AskApache Search Engine Verify v3.5
  Adds the verification meta tags to home page provided by Google and Yahoo AskApache
• Do Follow v4.0
  Removes the evil nofollow attribute that WordPress adds in comments. Denis de Bernardy
• Simple Trackback Validation v2.1
  Eliminates spam trackbacks by (1) checking if the IP address of the trackback sender is equal to the IP address of the webserver the trackback URL is referring to and (2) by retrieving the web page located at the URL used in the trackback and checking if the page contains a link to your blog. Michael Woehrer
• WP-Plugin List v1.0
  WP Plugin List is a simple plugin to allow yout post your current WordPress 1.5+ Martin Wiso
• WordPress Database Backup v2.2.3
  On-demand backup of your WordPress database. Navigate to Tools → Backup to get started. Austin Matzko
• Google Adsense widget v1.0
  Monetize with AdSense in your sidebar widgets! Mike Smullin
• front page login v1.0
  Adds a sidebar widget to allow logins on the front page Hermescb

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.

Steve Myers (Teaching and Learning Economics with Technology) has posted a Comparison of Digital Ink Products, including OneNote and Journal as well as SMART Notebook and others.

Jim Vanides (see this comment), a program manager for HP Corporate Philanthropy, has an interesting ed tech blog (you might also be interested in information about the HP Technology for Teaching grant program). Jim has posted about the same Dr. Cox that I mentioned last week:

One example comes from an HP Technology for Teaching grant recipient team at Murray State University, in Murray, Kentucky (USA). Dr. Terry Derting (Bio Sciences) and Dr. Ricky Cox (Chemistry) have been using HP Tablet PCs since 2004, and were recently awarded an HP Technology for Teaching Leadership award to continue and expand their work.

He also has good list of reasons why teachers should pay attention to the idea of Tablet PCs in the classroom in which he says:

Even one Tablet PC in a classroom can make a difference.

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.

I like using OneNote for Scribbling during meetings and making organizing notes to myself. I’m still stuck in the dark ages of OneNote 2003, but here are some sites that are more about OneNote 2007.

• The Unknown OneNote Guy’s Blog
• OneNote PowerToys
• OneNote Extensibility & More..

(As an aside, this is the first post I’ve made using only pen input.)

The Mobile PC Wiki, formerly the Tablet PC Wiki, is full of good stuff.  The name change reflects the inclusion of UMPCs, I think.  Hindsight Tablet PC is a nifty article that’s more or less things to think about before you buy that you probably wouldn’t have thought to think of until after you’d already had a tablet.

Silly though it may be, one of my favorite things about the tablet outside of the classroom is ink blogging and/or chatting with Windows Messenger where I can intersperse doodles and whatnot with the text.