Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

MicroCommenting

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Just a brief on a development from the folks at Future of the Book. They’ve created a new WordPress theme that allows for comments to be left on each paragraph, not simply at the end of the post. Huge potential there from a teaching writing standpoint and from a focusing the conversation standpoint. If you want to see it in action, check out McKenzie Wark’s book “GAM3R 7H30RY” and you’ll get a great idea of how it works.

Now I just need to find somewhere to get the theme installed so we can play…

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iHiking

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First off, I got an iPhone on Friday, and I love it. It’s not perfect, but I’m pretty impressed. (I know…that doesn’t take much.) It’s just…um…smooth and easy. The screen is amazing, and I am loving the full web browser. And the camera was way better than I expected. Nice.

So yesterday, when we spur-of-the-moment decided to go for an afternoon hike on the Appalachian Trail, I threw the iPhone in the pack. I know purists will decry the mixing of technology and trees, and to be honest, I didn’t tell Wendy that I brought it. But I’m glad I did.

We were nearing the top when another hiker and his dog appeared coming down the trail. Suddenly, his dog stopped short and started growling at the bushes. The hiker said, “Whoa! Check this out.” Of course, my kids started running over there, until they heard him say “It’s a black racer snake.” They screeched to a halt until we slowly walked over and saw this beautiful, long, black snake slithering through the underbrush. “Is it poisonous?” my daughter asked. The hiker didn’t think so, and I surely had no clue. So we kept our distance and watched a bit longer as it gracefully moved further into the stand of wild blueberry bushes.

I sat down on a rock overlooking the Delaware Water Gap, buzzards and hawks catching thermals and spiraling up right in front. And I reached into my backpack and pulled out the iPhone. Within a couple of minutes, I was reading about black racer snakes on Wikipedia. Nope, not venomous. They eat crickets, moths and small rodents. And they are fast. Tess and Tucker took turns looking for other pictures, and we pretty much confirmed what we had seen. We were learning on the fly. And then, we zoomed in on where we found it using the satellite feature on Google Maps which the iPhone makes really easy.

I, for one, think that’s pretty cool. We’ve seen stuff on other hikes and said that we were going to go back and “look it up” but, as often happens, we never did. The immediacy of this was what was cool. The fact that we wanted to know now, and we could. I know you don’t need an iPhone for that. No doubt, we coulda brought the trail book that identifies a lot of the things we saw. But this gave me an interesting feeling all around. And what it made me really yearn for was to have my kids chronicle their find at the Encyclopedia of Life, when it comes into full use.

Now that would really be cool.

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Our Family 5K in Splashcast

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So this is just a fool around test of Splashcast that I’ve just never gotten around to trying. Just a test. All about how last Sunday the four of us ran a 5K race and both of my kids won medals. Beautiful moment. And scary. My seven year-old ran it in 26 minutes. Oy.

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Google Gears (Among Other Things) Has Me Geared Up

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Tom posted that with Google Gears you can now use Google Reader offline. And here I just bought NetNewsWire for my long plane rides…darn. Works great, and now I’ll really start posting out to my Shared Items page which will also be collected in my new RSS goodness filled Pageflakes portfolio. Have I mentioned lately how much fun this stuff is? (Take a look at Screencast-O-Matic if you don’t believe me.) Anyway, when Google Gears works with GMail and Calendar, I will be a very, very, very happy man.

As you can tell, it doesn’t take much…

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Zoho Notebook

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So I’ve been meaning to get a chance to play with the Zoho Notebook beta but, as you recall, I’ve been working on balance. Somewhat. This morning I carved out 24 minutes to play, and here is the result.

Now I gotta tell you, while there are still some little glitchy things going on, (like this embed function doesn’t seem to be doing the trick) I think this has some major po. Here’s a direct link to the “book” where you can see there are page tabs down the side to add more information and create some wild kind of portfolio.

I’d love to hear/see what other folks are doing with this…

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Testing Flip Video

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So I plunked down about $100 for a Flip Video camera that holds 30 minutes of decent quality video and have been playing with it for the past week trying to figure out if I like it or not. Right now, I think I do, just because it is soooo easy to use to get videos online fast. The quality from camera to the local drive is good enough to bring into iMovie or whatever editing program you like and make use of it. The quality of the video once you get it up on YouTube is about a 6, the sound is pretty bad, but passable, and in general, you get what you pay for. But, did I mention that it’s just very easy to use? And these days, that’s worth a lot.

Here’s a quick sample of my wonderful daughter making her pony purple:

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Forays into Second Life

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As if I don’t have enough time to get my first life in order, I’ve been spending a bit of time exploring Second Life of late. As with anything else new like this, it helps to have a mentor, and mine has been Kevin Jarrett (aka KJ Hax) who has been kind enough to take some time to show me some very cool places. (If anyone cares, my SL name is Blogsar Lumpen…don’t ask. And that’s Kevin in the picture, not me. I need a serious wardrobe adjustment. And some hair.) Anyway, there are a lot of people who are putting some serious time into creating education spaces, and some of them are pretty provocative. I’m still waiting to sit in on a live presentation to get the full effect, but the guided tours of a couple of the islands that I took Saturday night were pretty incredible.

Anyway, today Kevin is up at Suffern Middle School in NY getting a first hand look at their use of Second Life.

In a few short hours I will be walking the halls of Suffern Middle School … as well as cruising their teen-created digital world, Ramapo Islands. With Victoria as my guide (she has been there before) today promises great things. I will meet new people (virtually and in person), experience a middle school language arts classroom actually USING SL as an instructional tool, and I will get to see the Ramapo Islands build in detail for the first time. I’ll get to meet Peggy Sheehy, the leader of the SMS initiative. And, I’ll also get to finally meet Victoria (Catherine Parsons in RL) – an educator, mom and Ph.D. student whom I have gotten to know very well with via SL over the past month or so.

 I’ll be interested to see what he finds out.

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Test of Mojiti

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Attention: This is just a test…and it doesn’t seem to be going to well, in fact. I’m playing with Mojiti, the site that lets you annotate videos with all sorts of cool stuff, including, um…video. (What a concept.) Anyway, when you click play below, you’ll hopefully see Karl Fisch‘s “Did You Know?” video and eventually see me talking over it. Seems there are two of me at some point, so when you hear the second audio kick in, just restart the video and it should work from that point. Take a look:

Let me know what you think of the tool, and, if you actually managed to see and hear the video, what you think of the idea…

Make Your Own Google Maps…Too Cool!

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Ok, so check it out, dawg…here’s an example of what you can do with the new “My Maps” feature from Google. Go on…go look.

Now, if your head ain’t swimmin’ with ideas like mine is… My children don’t know it yet, but they just became the map makers for all travel related to the Richardson family. (And we just figured out that the whole clan is going to Australia this summer.) I can’t wait to show them this.

I know this isn’t news, but this is the kind of stuff that still gives me butterflies. Stupid, I know. It’s also the kind of stuff that I want to go running into schools with, shouting “Look what our kids can create! Look what they can contribute!”

It’s a great time to be a learner, isn’t it? Very cool…

(And PS…if you haven’t seen this yet, check out Step #19 in the directions Google gives in getting from my town to Stockholm, Sweden where my relatives live…too funny.)

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Angus King at NCCE

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Just got a chance to listen to most of the keynote address by former Maine Governor Angus King at the NCCE 2007 conference. (Was actually sitting behind Tony Vincent who looked like he might have been blogging the address.) He’s a great speaker, and the 1-1 laptop program that he brought to his state a few years ago is certainly one of the more visionary implementations on a large scale that this country has seen, at least. I think in general, he gets it right when he says the program isn’t about technology, it’s about learning.

But I wonder what that learning looks like. To take nothing away from the governor since I really don’t know what the pedagogies are surrounding the use of the laptops, I wonder if we’re talking primarily the delivery of content in digital form or we’re talking about the use of the connection the laptop facilitates to create expanded opportunities to learn. Governor King stressed the importance of teaching students to find and evaluate information, and for the need to be able to solve problems with that information. But I didn’t get the sense that the way to do that included an ability to work asynchronously and collaboratively in distributed environments. (Wow…that sentence sure has a log of geek speak. How about:) …included an understanding of how to use the connections that are now available to us to solve problems together.

Like I said, that may be a bit unfair. But once again, what I hear from the teachers who have attended my sessions here so far is a lot of “yeah, but,” as in “yeah, but my district blocks blogs” or “yeah, but my administrators are scared to death of this stuff.” We’re still not getting the value of the connection for learning. And maybe I’m getting too narrow in my thinking here, which really is a definite possibility.

But through all of this, I keep seeing Steve Hargadon and the great work he’s doing in terms of finding low cost ways to get computers into kids’ hands. Businesses throw away 100,000 laptops a day in this country, and almost all of them can be made to work well enough to get kids connected for almost nothing. So, as the Governor said, it’s not the computer that’s important, it’s what the computer can do.

Thing is, about the only thing we need the computer to do these days is create the connection. Which makes what Vermont is doing even more interesting. Giving every kid a laptop is one thing, but giving every kid a connection to go with it is critical in this day and age.

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GoogleLit Trips

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So this is pretty cool…take the great piece of literature that you’re studying and plot out the travels of the characters on Google Earth and then, of course, share the goodness. This GoogleLit Trips site is put together by Jerome Burg in California and features Google Earth downloads for Candide, MacBeth, The Odyssey and The Aeneid among others. Just save the .kmz file to your computer, then open them up in Earth. He also has a document that shows how to format the bookmarks to add relevant information about he book.

I need more time…

(Thanks to Anne Bubnic for the pointer.)

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Picnik: Online Photo Editing

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Tim Lauer recently pointed to Picnik and after just a few seconds of playing around I already love it from every angle. It’s free online photo editing, it does more than iPhoto (which is one of the few things I haven’t liked about my MacBook), it integrates with Flickr in a snap, and it’s got a healthy dose of Web as app wackiness about it. (Just read the phrases that come up as you create and account and upload photos.)

So I ask, seriously, are we at the point where the Web based stuff is almost as good as the pay to put on your computer stuff? Or, at the very least, is it good enough to compete with the 20% of what we actually us of the software we buy? Google Docs, Podomatic, YouTube, Zoho, JumpCut, now this…

Pretty cool if you ask me.

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Zoho My Goodness..

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Watch this video and then tell me what you think your students could do with this:

Personally, I can’t wait. As much as I love Google Docs and stuff, Zoho is seriously, seriously, cool. Microsoft Office what?

Reminder: New York Times Link Generator

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I mention this only because Stephen Downes referred to the “user hostile” links to many New York Times articles that go behind the subscription wall in short order. The New York Times Link Generator is a tool that I’ve been using for the last two or three years that will provide open links to articles even if the “regular” links get archived. This was through an agreement that Dave Winer reached with the Times that had something to do with RSS feeds a while back. Anyway, it’s easy: take the address of the article you want to have access to, paste it into the link generator form, hit submit, and voila, on the next page you’ll get a new, longer address that will remain clickable forever…at least for now.

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diigo and del.icio.us

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You may have noticed (or you may not have) the daily bookmarks posting that has been showing up here for the past few days. It’s a list of all of the sites/posts that I have been saving to my diigo account, which in case you haven’t heard of it, is a social bookmarking tool that feels like a combination of del.icio.us and Furl plus a bit more.

With diigo, you can do most of what you can with del.icio.us in terms of saving links with various tags, connecting to other users who have saved the same post or used the same tag, and tracking either users or specific tags (or specific tags of specific users) via RSS. Even more, however, is that like Furl, diigo captures a copy of the page, so if it disappears from the Web at some point, you can access it in your archive.

But what’s really different is the diigo allows you to highlight certain sections of any Web page you’re on, and also gives you the ability to attach sticky notes to the site. Those highlights and notes are then visible should you visit that page again. But even better, if you have a diigo account and I have “forwarded” the page to you, you can see them add your own when you visit the site as well. Think digital feedback on student work.

Now while the diigo user base is much smaller than del.icio.us, quite a few people are adding some interesting links and resources. And one other nice feature is that when I add something to my diigo account, it also gets added to my del.icio.us account. By the way, C-Net has a review of diigo that highlights some of the good points.

There are a lot of applications for classrooms here, and I’ll try to expound on them the more I experiment with it. Bottom line is I’m starting to like this tool more and more, and I’m wondering who else might be playing with it.

(Image from diigo)

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Beware the Cell Phone

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eSchoolNews has an article about New York City schools considering a plan to have students stow their cell phones in a locker on their way into school.

New York City school officials are taking some heat for a proposed solution to the city’s controversial ban on student cell phones in schools. The proposal would have students leave their cell phones in special lockers outside their schools, and students likely would pay 25 or 50 cents to use the lockers each day.

Um, yeah. That’ll work. Not only take away the tools with which most teens communicate and learn, but charge them for the privilege of not having them. How about this…put a locker at the door for them to stow all their textbooks, let the cell phones inside and teach them how to use them to access all the info that’s in the books.

And Tom Hoffman (who is in the lead for most posts of 2007) writes about danah boyd’s predictions about social networking. In the snip Tom pulls out, danah says:

I believe that teenagers are the reason that mobile will happen sooner than we think…I think that mobile social network-driven systems will look very different than web-based ones but the fundamentals of “friends” and “messages” and some form of presence-conveying “profile” will be core to the system.

If you read the whole post, however, you’ll see that danah is steeling herself for some “blood baths” this year involving “hyper-visible examples of bad teen behavior.” This is part my worry too, that instead of looking at these incidents as a call to educate our students to use these tools more effectively, it will be fodder for schools to simply clamp down even more. Part of why I think this will get worse before it gets better.

But on the cell phone as social networking tool idea, Tom follows up with some interesting thinking about why this might be a good thing:

Having kids’ social networking move onto their phones would be good for schools. Students not using school computers and the school network for this stuff will cut liability concerns and filtering paranoia. Plus it just seems like a better fit for the role cellphones play in kids’ lives.

I wonder, however, if that wouldn’t then really necessitate schools having kids check their phones at the door.

Finally, I find this snip from the Economist Magazine’s “The World in 2007” issue (as blogged by Smart Mobs)

Internet-capable mobile phones will be revolutionary, at least for those who can read and have the money to buy data bundles. The humble SMS will have an even greater effect on East Africa in 2007. Innovative uses of SMS will allow people to move money by text messages; to receive information on, say, maize prices, along with tips on planting; and to recieve medical advice, a particular benefit to those living with tuberculosis or AIDS.

It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that the convergence of all of this will fit in our pockets. It has to. The culture is demanding mobile computing, and it’s being driven by our kids. And I think we need to start looking at ways to leverage that ability.

Where to start? Experiment. A first step might be to go to Mogopop and put together a lesson that can upload to an iPod.  Not a phone, I know, but that ability will be here sooner than you think. It’s an easy way of getting your head around how it might play out. Any other ideas?

(Photo “Penguin Cell” by Pepewk.)

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Mogopopp-ed

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So it’s been a few days of silly little coincidences, like the two people who within about 10 minutes of each other contacted me from very disparate parts of the globe to tell me about Mogopop. Like, whoa!

Somebody, somewhere was writing about not having much patience for new tools that they can’t figure out in like 10 nanoseconds since there is so much other stuff to try out there. I’m more and more finding myself without patience for tools that aren’t extremely easy and intuitive, no matter what they claim to offer. But this little Mogopop thing has me hooked. Basically, if you’ve ever wanted to deliver a course via an iPod (or, perhaps someday, a phone? Maybe?) then Mogopop is the tool of the moment.

Now I know this first attempt isn’t anything stellar, but seriously, in about seven minutes I put together this little aggregation of photo, video and text that you can now download to your video iPod (and, perhaps someday, your phone? Maybe?) and get a quick idea of what, um, my daughter looks like, the Wikipedia definition of Web 2.0 (needs some formatting) and a short clip of some kids at a workshop I did in the U.K. I know, I know…not much that’s useful there…except the concept.

So imagine if you will, a whole slew of quality content like this that learners can access and port with them, or better, learners putting together resources that can be shared with the community to further their thinking and discussion, or perhaps portfolios of work, or maybe personalized reflections in audio, video, text form, or… All deliverable to your iPod (or, perhaps someday…) What else?

And wow, already three other people have downloaded my project! Web goodness! (I know…I need to get a life…)

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Lovin' That GPS

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So last week I decided to give my directionally challenged spouse an early holiday gift…a window-mounted Garmin i5 GPS…and we tried it out on our trip to Connecticut this weekend. All I can say is “Oh. My. Goodness.” Now I fully admit to being naive about many things technological. But this little device is just blowing me away. Not only does “Abigail” (so named by my daughter) give us incredibly accurate directions no matter where I want to go, she can also find all sorts of kewl stuff that will surely (if it hasn’t already) render the yellow pages and 411 obsolete. Kids want a tuna sub? Hmmm…let’s see…the nearest Subway is 1.6 miles away…start navigating…we’ll be there at 12:34…go straight, make a left at the light, park.

Or on our way home I remembered that I’d forgotten my LCD to MacBook connector at one of my recent presentations and needed a new one. Could Abigail know where the nearest Apple Store might be? Um…yeah. Even gave me the phone number so I could find out if it was open. (I know, I know…there must be a built in system that will even dial the number for you…) Start navigating…be there in 14 minutes…but, sweet bejeepers it’s a huge mall crawling with shoppers…hurry, Abigail…navigate me HOME. “In point two miles, turn right then stay left…” Ahhh…peace.

Abby (my nickname for her) knows every street, shows rivers and lakes (when we were on the Tappan Zee Bridge her little monitor blazed blue aside from our narrow strip of road) and will even tell us how fast we’re going. (I wasn’t going nearly as fast as I thought I was.) But the best part is knowing exactly when we’re going to arrive at wherever it is we’re going.

Aside, of course, our final destination…

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Using Pageflakes as Student Portal

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Since we’re getting practical around here, I just wanted to share a Pageflakes page that I’ve been using in my RSS workshops to show how anyone can create topic specific portals with feeds. This page on Darfur/Sudan (not the most uplifting topic, I know…we have much to be thankful for) is built on tag feeds from YouTube for videos, Flickr for photos, the New York Times AND the Sudan Tribune for news, del.icio.us for what people are bookmarking, and Google Blogsearch for, well, blogs. What you get is a dynamic, constantly updated page of content about what’s happening in that part of the world and what’s happening in other parts of the world in response.

From a teaching standpoint, pages of this type can be pretty effective for bringing in potential content and then making decisions about what to do with that content. Not everything that shows up here will necessarily be suitable for some ages. (I have, however, created a same page for my daughter Tess about horses that I let her read at her discretion…she’s nine.) From a student standpoint, I think it’s a great way to introduce RSS, to give kids some ownership over the type of page they create (assuming you’ve had all the responsible use conversations already) and let them start working out their own processes for consuming and deciding about content in this content rich world. And the good news is that they can keep these pages private, or they can share them with groups (or teachers) so they don’t have to be as transparent as this example.

Additionally, the Pageflakes folks have been creating some interesting edu-specific “flakes”

that teachers can use. See this page, for instance, that has among other things a grade tracker, message board, to do list, and contact list. Again, since the student has the ability to keep these portals private, there are all sorts of ways that we can start introducing RSS and content management types of skills.

Finally, let me just emphasize the idea that in this environment when we can start collecting information from so many different sources around the globe, it’s imperative that we be modeling ways to do that. Imagine the types of global newspapers you could build around relevant topics with something like this. If we continue to just get the US perspective, I think we’re wasting a huge opportunity to expand and challenge our thinking.

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New Tools for Edbloggers

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Most of these probably are on the community radar by now, but here are a few new tools that I’ve run across that might be of interest:

Google Blog Search and Google Custom Search–The one thing that I’ve always been frustrated with at Technorati is the multiple steps it takes to set up an RSS feed for a blog search. Now, Google has made subscribing to a blog search feed as easy as subbing a news search feed. And the custom search makes it easy for every student to have a personal search of his/her blog or network.

Vox–This is the new social community set up by the founders of Moveable Type. Here’s my new Vox blog…anyone else got a site and want to be friends? What is intriguing about this is that it has many levels of privacy for individual pieces of content. It’s got all sorts of tie ins to del.icio.us and Flickr and stuff, extensive tagging and connecting capability, and fairly unobtrusive ads. I’d be interested to hear if anyone else has been thinking about Vox for classroom blogging/networking.

Flock Scrapbook–In case I haven’t mentioned it yet, I LOVE Flock. And now I love it even more. The scrapbook extension makes it easy for me to save an entire page, save a snippet of a page, highlight and annotate the stuff that I save, tag it all and organize it, search it all, and keep like tons of notes from disparate sources pretty well organized. It’s not a social extension, obviously, but it solves some of the limitations of del.icio.us that have frustrated me, namely the note space and full page archiving limitations. I’ve been playing with it for about a week and it’s pretty amazing. Anyone else on to it?

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Fun With Flock 'n Flickr

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It’s almost time to report out on my move to the MAC, but first, I have to say that Flock is quickly becoming my favorite tool of all. And I’m sure I’m not even scratching the surface. The ability to blog from any page, to blog right from my RSS reader (which, btw, is every bit as good if not better than Bloglines), the one-click to del.icio.us function, and now the geotagging extension for Flickr uploads through the browser have all made me totally forget about IE and are quickly leaving even Firefox as a fading memory.

Today’s 10-minute foray into my Flickr Maps page had my head spinning. I mean talk about a great opportunity for classrooms. I’m still not sure if I can automatically send geotagged photos directly to my map page or if I have to manually drop them onto the page. But still it was pretty cool to start looking at photos from around the world that people had already tagged.

There are some other tools that I’ve been playing with like Writely and Diigo that I’m finding pretty amazing…especially on my MAC. More about those at some point.

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Flock is Fab

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I’ll agree with Clarence…Flock is my new browser of choice, and that just after a few hours of playing.

It took me absolutely zero time to configure it so I can blog right to my Word Press site, save bookmarks in del.icio.us, upload pictures to Flickr and (thunder and lightning) read my feeds all in the same space. I mean for the first time, I am seriously thinking of retiring my Bloglines account. Whoa! I mean the aggregator alone is worth the switch. It makes saving posts easy, gives you all sorts of options for reading what’s new (like creating your own columned newspaper interface), allows you to bookmark and blog with one easy click (which I know Bloglines has but without this elegant workflow), and just feels so integrated with the whole package. I’m taking the opportunity to REALLY focus my reading even more by trying to keep to 75 or fewer feeds. And I’m having to make some really tough decisions because I do want to expand my reading to include some non-ed stuff and relevant searches. We’ll see.

The blog interface has a spellcheck, let’s me add tags really easily, and has a spellcheck. (Did I mention that?) It’s also got a cool little clipboard/web snippet tool that I can dump stuff into for later use. My goodness…

At any rate, score one for convergence.

I’m sure I’ll be posting more as I play, but I have to say at first blush, this is a very, very cool tool.

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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.