Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Tablet Schmablet…NOT!

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David Jakes, who I admire greatly despite his poor taste in Chicago baseball teams, has come to the conclusion that he doesn’t like Tablet PCs. Why? Basically because he thinks they are nothing more than a glorified ink note taking technology. Much like he eschews my Cubbies for the White Sox, he misses the point with tablets. (The point with the Cubs, by the way, is that long suffering is a badge of honor and persistence…in fact, I hope the Cubs never win…no, really.) It’s not just about, as he implies, taking notes using digital ink. It’s about what you can do with those notes once you take them. And it’s also about engaging both teachers and students in ways that regular laptops can’t.

Dave says he would rather save the extra money and “use an overhead and a dime transparency.” Um, ok…and then what? Throw the transparency away? Make paper copies for the kids? Why not take the digital ink notes that you take on a tablet and publish them to a class resource page where the students can review them if they want? Or add to them? Or where you can pull them down and refer to them later? And he also says that he’d stick with paper and pencil instead of tablets to work through problems because “I get enough e-mail.” Well, if all the teacher is doing is asking kids to e-mail in the homework, that’s not a very imaginative teacher. Again, why couldn’t the student post those notes for others to see? Better yet, what about making a screencast of the process complete with ink and sharing that in a similar way. Why couldn’t they become a part of a searchable digital notebook? Last time I checked, paper isn’t searchable.

He says:

What this amounts to is taking a 21st Century tool and applying it to old school teaching, industrial age teaching, where information is transferred passively to even more passive learners….

With the limited uses he cites, he’s absolutely correct. But I’ve seen better. I’ll pull out a couple of results from the white paper we did at my (former) school that was based on the research of a doctoral candidate at Columbia Teachers College and our own internal research that was reviewed by <name drop>Michael Dell</name drop> as a part of Dell’s tablet decision making process. Thirty-three teachers participated in the pilot study, and 100% of them said that the tablet functionality was important to their practice and pedagogy. To quote from the study:

In survey and informal conversation, most teachers said that they would not have thought inking would be so important before they had an opportunity to test it in the classroom and see how powerful a tool it was for student learning. The inking, used in conjunction with the wireless projectors, provided a tool for focusing student attention, helping diverse learning styles, illustrating complex concepts, instantly responding to student questions and capturing a record of each class.

Our researcher found that the pilot teachers cited the following five themes almost universally when using the tablets:

  • Instantaneous capability in the classroom
  • Connecting to students
  • Teacher productivity anytime, anywhere
  • Organization
  • Teacher Empowerment

I look at what happened at my (former) school as incredibly powerful, and meets David’s test of extending learning both for teachers and students. I can tell you that I will never be without an ink enabled computer again as I use it every day to build both a private and in some cases online notebook of work.

Finally, David suggests that using  Google Notebook and del.icio.us and wikis and the like would serve them just fine. Maybe, if they can access all of that. And perhaps our experiences were unique. I have to say that our planning and execution of the pilot had complete buy in from the school community which is why everyone in the pilot and and the technology committee agreed to roll it out to the entire staff this fall (budget cuts willing.) But I think we’re just beginning to see the possibilities.

At any rate, don’t dismiss tablets just yet. The price point may still be high, but they have much to offer besides “just” taking notes.

Tablet Tagging

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One of the other pre-conference conversations last night was about the Tablet PC. One of the schools here got a grant to put Tablets into 20 teachers’ hands and the result has been, not surprisingly, very favorable. The responses sounded a lot like those of the teachers at my school who have talked about how the new classroom model has changed not only the way they teach but the way they feel about teaching. Very cool.

One thing I’ve started to do more and more with my tablet is to take interesting blog posts or articles found on the Web, “print” them into OneNote, the most awesome notebook program for the Tablet, and then mark them up as I read with the pen. In doing so, I’m creating a whole searchable library of interesting content, I’m also creating a whole searchable library of my handwritten notes. So now what I can do is not only add tags to a certain article, I can tag pieces of an article for retreival later. (See this example snippet of David Warlick’s latest post…I simply add the number 1 at the end of the tag to separate if from words in the text.) That is very, very cool, I think, and something that I wish I could do on the Web in general. Imagine if you could pick out half a dozen sections out of one piece of content and tag each one individually. That would really separate out relevant content and make synthesis of it all later so much easier.

The problem is that I feel like I’m doing double duty now, creating my own library in OneNote, yet still saving bookmarks in del.icio.us. I’m finding the former more powerful, but the latter more social, obviously. Not going to stop sharing, but I have to say the difference between the two is pretty striking.

Ink Blogging

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I think this may be a first…blogging software for Tablet PCs! The latest version of Alan November’s November Learning Communities software actually has a inking feature, and I test posted to my Seton Hall class site. Very, very cool. It’s no secret that I love my Tablet PC, and not that I’d start writing all my blog posts like that, but just think of the possibilities for a few seconds. Art. Diagrams. Mind maps. All sorts of stuff that would be really, really neat to capture and use. The software also has easy support for podcasting and other enclosures (like Google Earth.) Much more later, I’m sure…

Tablet Tales

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When I saw this cartoon from Hugh MacLeod I had to laugh. This pretty sums up the feeling of the teachers in our Tablet PC pilot group, who are now in the process of refining the summer curriculum for the 175 or so additional staff who will be using them in their classrooms next fall. There are a couple of reasons why leaving this job is difficult, and the Tablet program is certainly one of them. I can’t imagine what might happen here next fall when every classroom is outfitted with wireless Internet access, wireless access to a ceiling mounted projector, a full lineup of multimedia peripherals (DVD/CD player, speakers, microphones, etc.) and a well-prepared teacher with a Tablet PC. Could be very cool, and I’m sure I’ll be stopping back for a look periodically.

I alluded yesterday to the fact that we’d had a group of visitors from a school in south Jersey, and they were pretty much in awe of what they saw. It’s hard not to be. I even learned a trick or two yesterday in terms of using the projector effectively, which is not something we did a lot of training on. At one point, the Spanish teacher we were observing handed the Tablet to one of his students and asked her to fill in the names of objects he had highlighted on a PowerPoint slide. As he did so, he froze the screen so no one could see what she was writing until he was ready to show it. Not a big deal, I know, but still pretty interesting.

I’ve really become a proponent of the Tablet, and little birdies are telling me that all sorts of goodness is coming down the pike both in the software and hardware arenas. I can’t imagine ever being without one at this point.