(Link via Jenny) I’ve been playing around with my new Acer tablet PC for about a week now and it’s pretty incredible in terms of handwriting recognition and portability. Now comes this DesXcape thingy from Philips which looks like basically a tablet PC that you can dock and use as a desktop. What a very cool idea. I really like the tablet concept in general, and some of the supervisors who I have shown are chomping at the bit to try one out as they could WRITE notes during observations, translate them into text and have most of their work done by the time they leave the room. Student use has some interesting potentials too.
What about this vision…My journalism students settle down after the bell rings and take out their tablets and fire them up. I give them five or ten minutes to do some freewriting which they then post to their Web logs using the built in 802.11b LAN. When they’re done, we spend some time talking about feature leads, and they check their news aggregators for some samples that I “sent” them earlier and have projected on screen via LCD. They do some quick edit and response using the stylus, and post to their Web logs. One click and those posts are aggegated into my computer, and I open a few at random that we discuss together on screen. I ask them to take a few minutes to search for more feature lead examples from today’s papers online. They post, I aggregate, we talk. Finally, I upload a fact sheet from which they write their own leads and post to their Web logs/notebooks/portfolios which I again collect and read in my own Web log…and so it goes. Sheesh…
Laptops are one thing, but just from a tap, tap, tap standpoint, they can be distracting. Think about creating quiet text and graphics all at once and then just clicking a button…
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