Inside-Out

Ok, today was the live run with CP in the hands of students. With CP on the HP tablets students can directly ink over the slides I'm transmitting and save those as their notes, which they seem to like. An added benefit is that this saves me having to print the slides out in advance, and they don't have to scramble to write down everything on the slide. The real beauty - pedagogically speaking - is the ability of student to send you their work. Sure you can do this same sort of thing with clickers, but with CP and the tablets the range of questions you can ask is so much greater. You can have them sketch diagrams, or graphs, annotate pictures, do quantitative problems, or even written work. Although this is my first experiment with this as a teaching tool the results were encouraging. My only complaint is that some pen tracking was off by about 2" on some of the machines. I'll have to keep tabs on that.

I noted earlier that the pen tracking was off when using CP. The problem seems to be tied to when the students start CP in standard laptop mode, and then change it to tablet mode. A simple restart of CP in the new mode solves the problem!

I hosted an informational session and a "getting to know the tablet PC" workshop today for Lawrence faculty. Representatives from the humanities, social science, and natural sciences as well as IT folks attended. We enjoyed some productive discussions about how the tablets could be used in Micro and Macro economics and explored their usage in student writing.