Tablet Tales

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.