Tablet PCs I've been wanting to play with tablet pcs since I started working at Bryn Mawr, but until recently, they were a little too pricey. Now they are about the same price as a good laptop. As part of the Writing in Quantitative Disciplines grant I participated in, we purchased two over the summer. I recently purchased a third and am thinking of getting a fourth. One of the tablets is currently on loan to a professor who participated in the grant-funded workshop. He is going to try his hand at marking up papers digitally using the tablet. The idea behind doing it this way is that it doesn't change much that one normally does when marking up papers (you can even make the pen red) but the whole process is digital and doesn't involve physical paper being exchanged. We discovered, in the process of making sure everything was set up properly, that the new version of Word allows one to write in the Word document itself without needing a plugin. You can save the file with the markup and can open it in any version of word and see the markup. Even print it out! I'm looking forward to hearing about the results of this trial run.

But tablet pcs can be used for even more. Another professor is using one to screencast her lectures. That is, she'll be recording them and saving them to be put on the web for review later as a video file. She'll be using Windows Journal to write formulas and draw diagrams, all of which will be recorded along with her voice. So students will have a good record of what happened in class.

The Biology department is purchasing a tablet of their own and will likely use a combination of PowerPoint and Journal for their lectures, which they will also record. I'm running a workshop for them today. Check back later for notes (and screencasts!).

In addition to all the great uses above, we are probably going to purchase a few more tablets for use in smart classrooms as a kind of substitute for white boards. The great thing about tablets is the ability to write on almost any file. You can write on a PowerPoint and save the results or write on separate "paper" like you would the chalkboard or whiteboard. You can save the results of that as well. And that is the big benefit. Whereas before, what happened in the classroom faded into a distant memory, now there are easy ways of capturing it. The hope is that this leads to better learning. ¶ 9:09 AM, posted by Laura