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?"

Comments

My solution

[plague911]

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..