Tablet PCs
A few weeks ago I replaced my I-don't-know-how-many-years-old little Acer TravelMaTe C110 tablet PC by a brand new state of the art XT2 from Dell. It's quite an improvement: Much better screen, double touch (like these Apple phones) and it supports finger touch too. In addition, it runs under VISTA which has built-in tablet-PC support (One good thing to say about VISTA, I won't discuss here how much I dislike all operating system including the free ones and the one from Apple).
Anyhow, getting an XT2, was an occasion to round up some software. The tablet PC article summarizes some that I found and installed. It also points to two educational applications I wasn't aware of before: Classroom Presenter and Group Scribbles. The former is a scribbling and annotation tool that is really easy to download, to install and to use. It works both for single users (i.e. the teacher) and collaborative classroom settings. As such it can be compared to the excellent Freestyler collaborative modeling, scribbling and annotation application that I have been using for years. Group Scribbles is a server-client application that I didn't try out.
I also tried out commercial software, e.g. MS OneNotes. I tried to take notes with this at the LIFT conference and I am not convinced at all. I'd rather use emacs - a twenty-year old programming editor - to write down stuff. Personally, I find tablet PCs really useful for teaching (read the tablet PC article and follow up the links). In addition, it's useful to have a pen-based input device in cramped spaces such as airplanes. The big surprise from Microsoft was InkSeine, a free note taking / idea management product from Microsoft research that plays around with new interface paradigms for tablet PCs. Interesting, if you are interested in UI design.
I am not much of a "hardware freak", but I do feel that in the near future hardware will play a more important role in educational technology research and practise. So far, we got mobile computing (lots of papers, little impact beyond podcasts), classroom response systems, and the much over-hyped interactive whiteboards (e.g. Smartboards). IMHO, the future will be more surprising, e.g. 3D Printers described (for now) in the Fab lab article may have a lot of potential. I'll get one of these no later than during the next internal funding period by the end of the year.
