So | find myself in something of a conscience crisis.
lam in one of those is it really working moments that is happening all too often at The moment.
First up. This tables PC thing. I’ve got myself an absolute monster of a machine. Hs gel a cove Duo processor, a gig of ram. Its gel a 12 inch Screen so potentially its light enough to always have at hand to quickly jet down a nougat through to a website. I have 80 gigabytes of hard dive space that, can full up with useful “stuff!! ¥ paid for a DVD miter so I can shave my shut. And on it goes.
When I first got mu. tablet I prepared itself to become
• garn. A abutter. A tablet evangelist converting hither and thither.
I traveled the web looking for applications that would Show off the miraculous properties of my new torn.
first on my list of must haves was Art Rage. The guy had already sent me a full license to ¥ was lucky enough to be able to really run the programmer through it’s pace). My verdict. Art Rage and pen computing are a marriage made in heaven.
Next up I needed to look at handwriting. Note here that I’ve been using handwriting on an pocket pc since 1998. So I’m reasonably au fait with what it can and can’t do.

And so here lies the problem. I handwrote the first part of this post into OneNote (because that’s where I now keep a lot of the “stuff” I collect and because I can theoretically covert that text into typed text. (You can see a snip of what my handwriting looks like here. ) One of the huge advantages for me of using a computer (of most descriptions) is the ability to save information and ideas and be able to sift and sort through them later (like – I took notes at that meeting and …. this is exactly what she said and I wrote down at that time). Will I be able to sift and sort through the above stuff? I possibly have the only cove Duo tablet in town that I paid for in Yen?

So where am I going with this and what is my conscience telling me? That many of the benefits attributed to putting tablet technologies into the hands of teachers and kids are imagined or overblown. Apostasy? Probably.

The ether is full of educators who are promoting tablet PCs as the next big thing for students (well after Web 2.0 that is). Even here in Godzone we have a Digi-Ops project based on a partnership between HP and a school in Wellington who are using tablets with year five and six kids. They are all very keen to show enhanced learning outcomes! Paperless classrooms!

And so they should be! But there needs to be more work. As I hope I have proven with the first part of this post, using a pen to get writing down is cumbersome and slow (I have a whole lot of Ulearn notes to prove this further). The time spent correcting from pen before proof-reading and editting is wasted time. And yet, in review after review I see all of this waffle about speed and accuracy with the pen. Not true. I simply don’t believe it. Typing is still quicker and more accurate for anything more than a simple jotted down note. I know that Vista is promising to be light years ahead in handwriting technology, but these schools are claiming speed and accuracy now. With today’s technology.

So where does the pen become useful? As I stated before, if you can translate, Artrage is a wonderful example of a programme that is only enhanced by a pen. I have also found that I find the pen is an amazing tool in KidPix, MSPaint and in PaintShop Pro. I find the pen is useful when I annotate or edit Word documents – in Excel it is clumsy and frustrating. I enjoy using the pen to edit PowerPoint slides on screen. I can make a presentation more interactive by putting comments or ideas straight up there.

But wait, there is more to a tablet than just a pen enabled device. I like to lie around and surf the web or to take my tablet to bed and cruise through my RSS reader. The form factor makes it a great device for doing just that. The buttons and pen mean that navigating through web-pages is easy. Do kids in classrooms lie around and surf mindlessly through blog feeds. I hope not, but maybe I missed that particular Web 2.0 goodie.

During meetings, (if I’m in slate mode) the tablet sits on my knee meaning that I don’t look over my screen to the other people. This is good. However, the innacuracy of my handwriting means that I spend far more time looking down correcting my errors so I still don’t look at the people I am with. However I’ve seen lots of photos of kids clustered around tablets on the floor. Now that does look like a good thing – kids all with their own pen anle to add to a mind map … maybe that’s more like it? Next cluster meeting on the floor around my 12 inch tablet guys?

Here endeth the crisis? No, probably not. I wanna be a Tablet PC Evangelist. I really do! I have downloaded the Becta research papers to read later and I hope that I can find some more solid data (???) to support spending money on something that in my opinion has limited usage the way that it’s being presented today.