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

just a suggestion

[chelroms]

i've been studying and searching for good devices.... i only recommend to read on this site maybe the one you are fits the gadgets in here... here yu go mr. dosert...http://www.techandgizmo.com

Re:Definately Windows7 if Math is important.

[_spider_]

Yeah, just buy more....

I've done the math and it would cost us an astronomical amount to 'upgrade' to Windows 7 - not to mention a far from consistent user experience. We're already trying to get the kids used to the XP Mac routine (which, they've taken the Mac up at an astonishing rate).

The worst part about the Windows 7 question is that (in our tests) less than half of our district software runs correctly, if at all, on Windows 7 (we've had it on some of our sandbox computers trying things out).

Our push is now going to publishers of curriculum books, math software especially, to go to web-based apps. Thats where the future is. Personally, I think we should be teaching kids to use the keyboard on how to enter math language, or learn to use a calculator as well - real world skills. I don't like that we're teaching them to use something that they will likely not find in the business world.