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Best Tablet PC For Classroom Instruction?
dostert writes "With all of the recent hype of multitouch notebooks, the Apple Tablet, the Microsoft Courier, and the CrunchPad, I've been a bit curious about what happened to the good old pen and slate tablet PCs. I'm a mathematics professor at a small college and have been searching for a good cheap tablet (under $1000) which I can use to lecture, record the lecture notes along with my voice, and post up video lectures for the class. I have seen some suggestions, but many are large scale implementations at state universities, something my small private college clearly cannot afford. All I have been able to find is either tiny netbooks (like the new Asus T91), expensive full featured tablets (like the Dell XT), or multitouch tablets, that really wouldn't allow for the type of precision mathematics needs. I know a Sympodium device would work great, but we really can't afford to put one of those in each room, so something portable would be ideal. All I've been left with is considering an HP tx series. It seems nobody has created a new tablet like this in quite sometime, and HP, Fujitsu, and Dell are just doing incremental updates to their old designs. Does anyone have experience with this?"
It was the HP TC1100. Great tablet. It had a half-size keyboard but didn't feel cramped. Sturdy construction and decent enough battery life for being used. Too bad mine got stolen. I'd say it would probably fit your needs as long as you don't require recent connections or bleeding edge performance.
It had great tracking on it and I regret not getting one earlier in my academic career.
Man...I wish I could find the burglar's who stole it.
import system.cool.Sig;
...1 year to 18 months. There is a plethora of tablets about to hit the market it seems obvious to me that waiting will yield much more choice and better value. Prices would fall after a handful of competiting products have gotten on the market. This will also put more pressure on netbooks which will become cheaper, and the low end of the full laptop market will ratchet down in price too. Apple, Crunchpad and Microsoft, would be the three I'd seriously consider. A lean towards the latter two depending on what software you want to run.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
> It seems nobody has created a new tablet like this in quite sometime
Because it seems nobody really wants tablet (slate) computers. They are really neat and cool, until you have to *use* them. Then you usually find out that the interface is awkward, viewing the screen is uncomfortable, holding them is strange, and typing on a real keyboard is 100 times faster than trying to "write" or touch virtual keys one at a time.
Sure, there are some specific applications where they work quite well... but there aren't that many such applications. So demand is low and prices are high. This is one reason manufacturers started flirting with so-called "convertible" tablets- really just a standard notebook but with a swivel, flip tablet-like screen. Of course, those have issues too- they tend to be more fragile, more expensive, and heavier than just a plain notebook.
As someone who works in a multimedia department that co-ordinates AV purchases for a government institution (or at least tries to), my advice is to work with your AV guys on this one. Get a comprehensive solution that works for everyone. Otherwise you'll have a situation where you, the keen individual, will have a working solution that only you can use. Others will want one and either do something themselves (badly) or pressure the AV guys into implementing something too fast, too soon. Then whatever you have done will not work with what they have done.
I see keen individuals all the time. Work with the people whose job it is to get this working.
And what the guy said about waiting 12 - 18 months is spot on. Remember how many touchscreen phones there were and how good they were before the iPhone came along? Exactly. The landscape is about to change and adopting new tech now will be expensive. Wait.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Dont do it. My school had exactly what your trying to do and they got rid of it because it cost an arm and a leg to do it right. I personally like the feature but they basically needed a dedicated room and production crew to do it. (They did it for a while so students could video commute to class). For me as a TA and a student the best solution has been simply use a projector which can project a piece of paper and scan the paper later and post it online. If you really want some kind of video. The best option ive seen is a laptop with power point hooked up to a projector and a external microphone. If you want a tablet esq feature get a usb drawing pad for 100 bucks....itll save you an arm and a leg.... Its funny around here you see a lot of old professors using tablets etc however most of the younger professors use the old fashioned tech. I think part of growing up with all the technology is realizing when not to use it..
From a student.
Don't do it. If you want a new toy buy one and play with it, but leave it out of the class room.
I've been through several "let's get all high tech with the teaching" initiatives, and they all failed miserably.
The vast majority of the class ended up suffering through the mandatory attendance lectures and took notes from the book instead.
There is no concept in mathematics at that level that you cannot teach with a stick and a large patch of dirt.
Indoors, a chalkboard will do.
Any additional complexity or whizz bang gadgetry is at best a distraction and at worst a complete waste of your student's time.
Don't use technology as a crutch to prop up poor teaching skills.
I am currently a college student, and am at least minoring in math (Considering a double major). When I started I was 10 years out of high school and had forgotten so much that I had to start way back at Math 055 (Basic Algebra). Since then I have taken, in succession, Intermediate Algebra, College Algebra, Trig, Calc I, Calc II, Calc III, Linear Algebra, Proofs, ODE, and am now in Discrete Math. What I have discovered for myself, and from discussions from other students is that we learn the most and the best from instructors that use a good old fashioned chalkboard. It slows you down enough that we can take good notes and still follow what you are doing, it gives you something big enough to clearly point at when you are talking about a piece of what you are doing, and it largely prevents you from just displaying preprepared notes that you post online afterward and hope we manage to follow. If you feel we should have material supplemental to our notes and the textbook, make a handout or post such material online. Math has been successfully taught for ages using a chalkboard. Perhaps there are improvements that can be made to how we teach math, but believe me, switching to a tablet PC is not one of them.