Teaching with Tablets

This review provides an analysis of Tablet PC use, based on case studies from twelve English schools. It is a companion publication to Tablet PCs in schools: A review of literature and selected projects.

Norwood has been piloting the use of tablet computers among teachers since 2004 with positive results, and teachers have visited a school in Ohio at which all students have tablets.

The advantages of tablet computers fall into four general categories: 1) Combines access to resources in one convenient device2) Supports multiple learning styles3) Promotes collaboration, engagement, interactivity4) Provides unique capabilities

This list describes advantages of tablets:

Battery performance of your particular Tablet PC model

Charge your battery whenever you are at your workstation or AC power is available. Leaving your workstation with a fully charged battery is your first step in maximizing your mobility.

The brightness of your Tablet PC screen is often the number one consumer of power, so you can conserve battery power by turning down the screen brightness on your Tablet PC.

Another thing that OneNote is great for is shared note taking. What? You mean other people can share my notes? Well...only if you want them to.

Tips: Right-click a note to see who made the most-recent change to it and when it was made. You'll see a menu appear. Just look at the last 2 items at the bottom of the menu. It contains the date and time the note was last modified and the name of the individual who made that change. If 2 people have made a change in the same location and at the same time, a conflict occurs. OneNote does not preserve one users notes, while deleting another's. But rather, a hidden page, affectionately deemed a conflict page, will be created containing all unmerged changes. When this happens, a notification will appear at the top of the page. Simply click on it to reveal the page containing the unmerged changes. Or alternatively, you can click the icon that appears on the page tab itself. When you click the notification or the icon, the page expands to reveal the hidden page. On your page you'll see the final note that made it onto the actual page of notes, like this: When you click on the conflict page, you'll see the note that didn't make it onto the page highlighted in red, like this: What happens from here is completely up to you. If you determine that none of the unmerged changes are necessary, you can delete the conflict page and move on. Just select the page and press the <Delete> key, or right-click the page and select Delete from the menu. Once this happens, the conflict notification icons are removed from the top of the page and from the page tab. If you decide that you want to salvage the conflicting note, just copy the contents from the conflict page to the actual page of notes. Or, if you're not sure, just leave it. You can click the icon again to collapse the conflict page so it stays out of site. All conflicting changes will remain intact until you decide to take action.

Here is another setting change you can make in OneNote 2007. Tools>Options>Other>Battery Options and you can select a number of different levels from maximum performance to maximum battery life.

The first thing to make sure you do is to print to OneNote the same way you would want those pages printed on a printer. You can always zoom in to make things bigger. If you won’t ever need a hardcopy with your notes, don’t worry about this, but OneNote will try to group pages to fit all of one image in a page (keyword: try). If you have two PowerPoint slides to an image already, you won’t have to work with OneNote to make it print two images per page (because OneNote will likely just print one slide per page).

use a page layout that has the same dimensions as the page you will be printing to.

The ability to link the instructor and student devices, and to send information back and forth provides a mechanism for introducing active learning into the classroom and creates additional feedback channels.

To save battery power, you set up your computer so that when you press the power button, your computer goes into standby mode: a low power state that saves your work and quickly returns you to your desktop when you power up your computer again. You also select a power scheme that automatically puts your computer in standby mode after being idle for a certain period of time. That way, if you forget to manually put the computer on standby, it will automatically go into standby after it has been idle for a specified amount of time.

As a safety precaution, you set up your computer to go into hibernation when it reaches a specified low level of battery power. When your Tablet PC goes into hibernation, your opened files and your desktop are saved to the hard drive and your computer shuts down.

Standby reduces the power consumption of your computer by cutting power to hardware components that you are not using.

1. Defrag regularly

2. Dim your screen

3. Cut down on programs running in the background.

provide an interactive, multimedia digital blackboard

Students in the class describe, comment and "draw" on (annotate) images related to course topics, and complete such activities as filling in missing words in paragraphs and exercises. Professor Karagoz also has students use her Tablet PC during group writing activities, in which they use Windows Journal to complete short exercises.

Instead of using an overhead projector with transparencies, he used the computer to annotate slides and charts, marking the screen up in different colors to highlight key points or data as needed.