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.
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!
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 used CP in class today just to give a regular slide show and use the pen capabilities. Once I got the projector figured out it worked pretty well. My only complaint is that I cannot see the instructor notes in powerpoint (even with the display toggled). I can see them in CP, but this makes editing them problematic because you basically have to redo the instructor notes for the entire slide. Maybe this issue is addressed in the 2007 add in. For a free program I am satisfied with its quality, ease of use, and documentation.
Sean Schipper and I worked on using Classroom Presenter (CP) to facilitate student-instructor interaction in the class and in the field. In-class, we use Lawrence's wireless network. Outdoors I will need to use a wireless router. This is pretty straightforward, now I just have to figure out how to power the router without having to resort to a 30lb battery!
Day 2 of the conference was even better. In addition to a few plenary talks there were several smaller workshops dedicated to new and innovative software written to take advantage of the versatility of the tablets. It looks like Classroom Presenter from U. Wash is a product that will allow us to give field lectures via ad-hoc networks and will also serve as a good classroom collaboration software. (See http://classroompresenter.cs.washington.edu/). This type of application is essential if we are to move beyond simply replacing pencil and paper to developing new ways of delivering field-based courses.
After another session of working on our assessment plans I presented my poster at the poster session. Alas I didn't win any prizes, but I'm happy to say that two of the winners were from the environmental sciences.
In the birds of a feather lunch we talk about field use of the computers. Some folks have used the "pouch" to house the machines other just use an over-sized zip lock. All expressed interest in outdoor viewable screens.
After an exciting plenary session on the future of technology - sorry that's all I can say, due to a confidentiality agreement (lets just say the future will be exciting!) I heard a series of exceptional talks discussing how Tablets have been integrated into a number of courses and curricula. Lunch with "birds of a feather" connected me with a community of educators in the physical scientists. I found a few folks who have very similar applications and goals. We discussed details of our projects at length at the poster session. One tip was to go with Vernier probes - the company seems more geared towards college than Pasco.
Gloria Rogers from ABET gave a very informative talk on assessment. This was followed by small groups that reviewed the assessment matrix we prepared in January. The first thing I noticed was that we are probably being too ambitions in our assessment strategy. It might be best to scale things back and spend more time on a few things rather than try to do so many things. The second major thing I learned is that assessment takes upfront planning, but that it is also iterative. I'm glad we are offering the live version of the course next year so that we will have some baseline data.
After dodging a major snowstorm and traveling for 18 hours I finally made it to San Diego late Sunday night. What a beautiful place the Estancia Hotel is - I mean gorgeous.
I met with members of our IT team (headed up by David Berk) to discuss the creation of wireless field networks. They will be conducting some trials this term and will test SoftLink 8.5 which should allow us to conduct field lectures and some data sharing.
The project team gathered to work on our poster for the upcoming conference. We also discussed the assessment template. It was a difficult but useful exercise.
