Newsweek published its annual ranking of U.S. 1,300 public high schools. (Read about the methodology.) Is the school your child attends on the list?

Mark Wagner has obviously worked hard on the content for the El Morro Intro to Tablet PC Workshop. Just pop over to the wiki to read the list of topics covered. I'd love to see even more on using Tablet PCs for classroom management, as well as annotating and grading papers. Tablets are great tools for these types of tasks.

Recently, I've received questions about what application teachers can use on a Tablet PC that would be like a transparency or overhead.

Check out WriteOn, a project out of Virginia Tech. Teachers can annotate and "play back" to reveal information. This would be particularly useful for complex formulas, equations, and staging labels.

My two teenage nieces primarily use home computers for school work. Unfortunately, their school uses computers in labs only.

Current PC of choice seems to be the well used, beloved HP TC1100 Tablet PCs, which they say do the trick most of the time. They mainly write essays in Word, quick notes in Journal, and the calculator. Next comes IE with search engines helping them find their way to whatever word they need to use. It's solitary work, not collaborative and yes, homework still gets printed on paper.

 I know Rob's kids use PCs in their homeschool. What about the rest of you. How do your kids use computers for school work? What do they need created or enabled to get them over that next edge?

LectureScribe is a whiteboarding application that you can use with a Tablet PC or interactive whiteboard. The app has a great ink playback features, which is particularly useful for revealing complex proofs, concepts, or other information.

In a Clemson University newsletter, Brian Dean, who wrote the app, described how he uses this Flash application:

Over the past few years, I have used LectureScribe for a variety of purposes: sending multimedia notes to students and colleagues in response to questions over email, posting supplemental material in my courses, making research notes for myself to view in the future, and finally in the development of a multimedia textbook where difficult material is explained using short animated mini-lectures.

The Association of Small Computer Users in Education (ASCUE) Conference 2008 will have a workshop on building video tutorials that includes LectureScribe tips for Tablet PC users.

Conference Dates: June 15, 2008 - June 19, 2008
Location: Myrtle Beach, SC
Conference website: http://www.ascue.org/ 
Presenter: Steve Anderson, U. South Carolina - Sumter
Workshop Date: Sunday, June 15, 2008
Time: 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.

PCs entering the classroom so that each child can potentially have all day access to curriculum and content is a phenomenal shift in schools. PCs like the Intel Classmate with appropriate software have been making in-roads at this 1:1 computing effort. The second generation is now out and Classmate 2.0 is making press review rounds. Are you finding these reviews helpful? What additional types of information do you need?

Darren Waters of BBC posted his first impressions recently:

It's a cut-price, cut-down laptop that runs XP moderately well, and connects to the net without a hitch. In fact, it accomplishes most tasks thrown at it without a hitch and its underpowered processor only really struggles when it is attempting to multi-task.

Purdue University is hosting this year's Workshop on the Impact of Pen-based Technology on Education (WIPTE). Submissions for papers, videos and posters are now being accepted.

Conference Dates: October 15 - 16, 2008
Conference Schedule future location

Here are some of the details for the Call for Papers:

Submissions Due: June 16, 2008.

Objectives: A wide variety of disciplines are embracing Tablet PC's and similar pen-based devices as tools for the radical enhancement of teaching and learning. Deployments of Tablet PCs have spanned the K-12, undergraduate, and graduate levels and have dealt with an amazingly diverse range of subject areas including nursing, veterinary science, geology, ethno-musicology, anthropology, landscape architecture, writing, mathematics, computer science, Japanese language, physics, engineering, art, economics, as well as others. Despite the diversity of content areas, many deployments have been similar in terms of the passion they have generated among students and teachers. The Third Workshop on the Impact of Pen-based Technology on Education (WIPTE) is intended to leverage this shared passion and to identify best practices in the educational use of pen-based computing so that all educators may benefit from this next generation of technology.

As Microsoft's Chairman, Bill Gates paints a vision of technology today and how those advancements can improve tomorrow and is a trusted advisor on how we can achieve these goals.

This week Bill Gates testified before the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Science and Technology on the celebration of the 50th of the Committee. He answered questions ranging from the knowledge gap with students, fundamental problems with teacher professional development, the next big thing in technology, to inspiring kids to learn. Gates' message is consistent with prior speeches, but reviewing is worthwhile. "It starts with education," he stated.

Also this week, Bill Gates addressed the Northern Virginia Technology Council (March 13, 2008). In this he gave more specific examples about technology available to students today, including the WW Telescope project from MSR and Tablet PCs.

So if you put it on your computer and say hey, I’d like to see that for myself – you just connect up your telescope and boom, there you are. You can acquire information, add that to your database. So software touching all the sciences in a pretty deep way. So with these platforms there will be a huge variation in how creative governments are in applying software to their task, how creative businesses are to apply it to their task, how schools can take this and do new things.

The School District of Philadelphia broke ground on its "School of the Future" in 2004. Today, students attending use Tablet PCs for course material, notes, and assignments. Classroom equipment is state-of-the-art. There is no doubt that the Philly SOF has influenced school technology plans at a world wide level.

Franklin County Regional School District is a few hours to the west, outside of Pittsburgh, and they're exploring ways to bring advanced technology to their students and teachers. The state of Pennsylvania funded $423,000. What equipment have they selected? 60 interactive whiteboards, projectors and mobile PCs for the teachers, along with peripherals like printers, still cameras, webcams and video cameras. Students will have access to 270 mobile PCs that are distributed through the school on nine carts. Sounds like a great start to a one-to-many classroom.

What type of PC did you use in 1987? Probably an IBM PS/2 compatible PC, which you used at work.

Many of this year's graduating student teachers were born in 1987. These future teachers grew up surrounded by computers. How do you think their experiences will change next year's classrooms?

A simple way may be the acceptance of technology in daily life, versus special training on how to integrate it into their workflow. Another way may be that they'll expect a PC to be used as their main classroom organization tool as well as for rich interaction.

Lenovo is sponsoring a second annual conference on 1:1 computing. This year it will be at Forest Ridge School in Bellevue, WA. John Phillips updates people on his blog, where he also shares how Forest Ridge uses Tablet PCs, OneNote, and various other products in the classroom. He says to stay tuned for more information. Can't wait.

When: April 7 and 8, 2008

Where: Forest Ridge School in Bellevue, WA

We've set up a module to allow posting from the iPhone. So, I'm checking functionality from the middle of the desert. We're about an hour from the Hoover Dam.

Everything seems to work, except image upload is disabled. You'll just have to imagine the sage brush. Oh, and that the iPhone auto corrects "Lora" to "Lord" --have to watch out for that. Ha ha.

In September, Microsoft released a case study reviewing how Abby Brown's linear algebra students at Torrey Pines High School used Lenovo Tablet PCs and Wolfram Mathematica. Many of the schools adopting 1:1 computing are going through a similar exercise, be it with Mathematica, Microsoft Math, Geometer Sketchpad, or another math application.

Hackettstown, NJ Public School offers a staff development program helping teachers learn how to use Smart interactive whiteboards, student response systems (clickers), and Tablet PCs in the classroom.