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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?"
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..
I work in the tech department for a small public school district with a heavy emphasis on educational technology integration in the classroom (we have a 1:1 laptop program as well). A few years ago, we did an experiment with tablet PCs, where we purchased 5 different models from the major vendors (IBM, HP, Fujitsu, Acer, and Toshiba), played around with them, and then offered them to a few teachers to try out. The only one we had any success with was the HP tc4200, which was given to a Primary teacher who used it extensively for a year.
The Thinkpad was the best unit in terms of 'feel'- it was light, solid, with a good battery life. However, both the first and second models we got were sent back because of poor performance (very slow to boot up, high latency during operation, and a tendency to run very hot). The Fujitsu was too heavy, as was the Toshiba. The Acer (Travelmate C200) was great in terms of performance (dedicated 256MB Nvidia graphics, 2GB RAM, etc), but was a bit bulky due to its built-in optical drive. In addition, Acer's method of sliding the screen up from the slate position was stupid, locking it into one angle when using the unit as a notebook. I'm using that one as a gaming platform now (three years later!). The HP tc4200 was, quite frankly, the best tablet I have ever used. It's light, sturdy (not quite as solid-feeling as the Thinkpad), and quick. The lady who used it said she never felt it was annoying to carry it around her classroom for most of the day. In addition to the tablet, we gave her a wifi-enabled projector, so she could work untethered while moving about, and this worked perfectly.
My suggestion is to get one of the tc4200's- they are dead cheap these days, and you can upgrade the RAM and hard drive easily if you wish. I have seen them for $400. Not only that, but you can even shoehorn OS X onto them if you are bored- I did that with our for shiggles and it was awesome for a few days before I missed my Macbook Pro too much!
Most projectors these days have built-in wifi for wireless projection (at least from Windows computers!), and this can really make a huge difference for instructors.
From a pedagogical perspective, you can even justify the cheap route and buy a bluetooth-enabled Wacom tablet. Sure, you don't get a screen built in, but for $250 you get the mobility of the tablet, as well as all the functionality of the penabled software such as Smart or Promethean offer. You can mark up notes, documents, etcetera and save your notes, email them to your students, and so on.
But my money's on the tc4200.
"Apparatus dignosco occultus, satis non supernus."
I have had the same dilemma. I teach an algorithms course at UVA; it is math- and proof-centric. I wanted the ability to "write like one might on a black board" but to also record my writing and my audio so that my lectures can be easily posted online for students to review later. I have used several different tools for this task:
(1) Toshiba Tecra? Windows tablet/Powerpoint/Camtasia. I would make my slides in Keynote. Export to Powerpoint. Give lecture on the Toshiba, use Camtasia to record, and then export to a flash and ipod format for the web. The best part of this is that Powerpoint+Camtasia+Tablet is well-integrated. Powerpoint allows you to mark up a slide using the tablet and save the strokes. Keynote and Powerpoint-on-Mac do not have this feature. However, this laptop belonged to a colleague. It was old, faulty, and involved hassles. Fonts would be routinely messed up between Keynote and Powerpoint. I researched new windows tablets to buy, but could not bring myself to buy one. I happen to use a Mac; I feel anxiety and unctuousness when I have to interact with a windows interface.
(2) Instead, I purchased a Wacom Cintiq 15" display. You can connect it to any laptop, and you can write on it like a tablet. It is also pressure sensitive; a pleasure to use. I used this with my Airbook in the following bizarre combo: Airbook-->VGA splitter--1-->projector and --2--> to Cintiq. Thus, I would get one presenter display for the airbook and one screen on the Cintiq/projector that was public. Unfortunately, Keynote did not allow writing on slides. Either did Powerpoint-on-mac to my surprise! I tried various "screen grafitti" applications on top of Keynote, but none of them would allow the markup to be saved. Finally, I came upon the "Jarnal" program---an open source program written in Java---that allows a notebook functionality. You can import PDF files into it and annotate them. Thus, my workflow is something like: Make slides in keynote--->Export to PDF--->open as background in Jarnal--->Lecture. Jarnal can also record the strokes and play them back. However, I found that a screen capture program "iShowU HD" could capture both audio and everyone that was presented. I would then transcode this into flash and post. This worked for 1.5 semesters. Jarnal is sometimes flaky. It does not render PDF correctly all the time. However, it exports your strokes to PDF, and it saves them in an easy to read .jaj file for future processing. We also use jarnal to grade homeworks online and return them online (no paper printing!),
(3) My current setup is this: Axiotron Modbook + Jarnal + Camtasia for Mac. The Modbook is a mac tablet. I thought it would be fantastic, but it hasnt really solved all of the problems. The pen/tablet interface is fine on the Modbook---but a little flaky sometimes. Jarnal is open source; and I really believe in using open source when I can. The recently released Camtastia for Mac works very well, but misses an important feature that the Windows version has: it allows the slides or pages that you use in your lecture to be bookmarked. The Mac version, however, is intuitive to use for me, and I have given 9 lectures so far without too many problems. It is also very convenient to come to class with just a tablet (instead of the contraption in (2)). You can see the results of some of these lectures from say http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~shelat/4102/2009/09/23/l9/#more-179 (skip over the first 15 min which is a guest speaker discussing if you want to see the jarnal/writing part). I do not use keynote animations (only drawings of data structures, algorithms, etc). Thus, the setup is the best one for me overall.
(4) Cheapest and surprisingly good solution: The Livescribe pen. (I received one to try for free, but it is only $129). You must write on special paper with dots. The pen has a camera and a microphone. You can give lecture and use one of those "overhead camera" contraptions that takes a picture of what you are wri