Võrgustik võrgutab Matemaatika & arvutitahvel Ragnar Õun TÜ Pärnu kolledž haridustehnoloog

Advantages: 1. No more messy overheads. I don’t have the classic blue hand from wiping the overhead with my hand. 2. No more worrying about old markers. I always get a clear crisp pen line. 3. I can write over all my worksheets. I don’t have to make an overhead to write on since I just write right over the word document open on the computer. 4. I can save all my work as jpg’s and upload them to my website. 5. I can quickly make a powerpoint and fill in the hard stuff later. I can make an outline of a powerpoint in a few minutes. The hard part is using MathType to make all the equations or diagrams that powerpoint can’t do. Now I can insert the “hard” stuff as I go through the powerpoint with the class. 6. I can have students come up to the tablet to work out problems. It’s new and students think its cool. 7. I never turn my back on the students to write on the board. That’s a big one. I have everything set up so I look at my laptop facing the students and they are looking at the projector screen behind me. 8. It can do everything a SmartBoard can do and it’s much cheaper.

Disadvantages 1. It takes a while to get used to the writing. It took a couple of hours of writing to get used to it. I imagine it’s probably true with learning to write on a whiteboard for the first time. 2. PowerPresenter RE doesn’t work perfectly with Vista. If you have the program running and then your computer goes to sleep, the program stops working. You’ll need to restart your computer. (OF course you don’t have to use that program. There are many other great ones including the InterWrite package.)InterWrite 3. You can’t move around. Some would argue that you are stuck to the desk rather than being able to move around the whiteboard. I just wrote a grant to get wireless tablets for the entire math department. I am convinced that this is the best way to go compared to a SmartBoard. I absolutely love the tablet as a teaching tool.

5th Grade Tablet PC Math System 5th grade students in Kelly Long’s math class have been piloting the Tablet PC Math System developed at Carnegie Mellon University. As described by CMU, “The Tablet Math System is a suite of applications, consisting of a thin client for use on tablet pcs and a web interface. The system allows students to write directly on a tablet pc to solve various types of simple mathematics problems. It also allows students to create scratch work for harder problems (i.e. long division). The students can have exercises assigned to them by their teacher, or practice on their own. The teachers interact with the system through a web-based interface. Through this interface, teachers can monitor student and class performance, assign exercises and manage their class. Teachers can also view class results in real-time, and view individual scratch work of students filtered by various criterias.”Tablet PC Math SystemCarnegie Mellon University

Hi Ben, I'm a physics/math guy myself, and yes, definitely a tablet is the way to go! It gives you the capability of keeping all your brainstorms and doodlings in one place. Otherwise, if you're like me, you wind up having hundreds of sheets of paper scattered all over your room, and you can't retrieve that brilliant deduction you worked out to study for your exam. I think every science/math person should get a tablet. There are also tablet applications out there which allow you to write an equation in your own handwriting and then graph the equation, just like a graphing program would, expect you enter the equation with handwriting, not laboriously typing symbols. It even animates them, for example, if you're doing a simple- harmonic-oscillator equation for a spring system, the program will actually animate the spring, and you can play with different values for the damping factor, etc. It's called "Math Journal" and "Calculator". You can read about it at this website: Other cool tablet math/science programs: Hope that helps! David

commentshttp:// comments I've tried to go paperless by using my Tablet PC to take notes in meetings and review documents electronically instead of printing them out. Ultimately though, it hasn't quite worked because at most meetings someone gives me something on paper, thereby crushing my paperless initiative. What I really need is a scanner built into the computer so I could just scan the paper into an annotatable PDF file at the meeting. I realize there are portable pen-like scanners, but it's not quite the same as something built in. Nevertheless, I might have to give that a try. I'd be happy with a scanner strip or something that requires the human to manually swipe the page. Even better would be a technology that allows a piece of paper to be placed on the actual laptop screen and then scan it in, although this is probably a ways away from implementation (Microsoft's Surface computer can do this to some degree).

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