• TouchKit Run for C++ devs for creating touchscreen apps: $1580 = frameless 70cm x 50cm multi-touch screen + calibrated infrared camera + SW pack
• Touchscreen ordering at restaurants (TheAge.com)
• On mini-notebooks or Netbooks: "Right now, the prices range from $300 to $800," says Via's Brown. "In the next year, $200 to $700 will be the range."
• Students at Klein School District in Texas get Tablet PCs, starting with Klein Oak High School
• Congratulations to rugged Tablet PC manufacturer, Mobile Demand for making Inc 500 list!
• Albatron Tee PC is a Windows CE 6 device with 400MHz ARM926, 7" display, 128MB, 128MB storage, WiFi, Bluetooth, & camera options
• First look at Fujitsu Lifebook T5010 Tablet PC
• Gigabyte Netbook Tablet PC: 8.9" display, swivel hinge, Intel Atom, 1GB DDR2, WiFi, Bluetooth, 1.3M camera = $799

Electronic text books are compelling because you can search and copy / paste the text, as well as the bonus that it doesn't weigh as much as the paper counterpart. But we all understand that publishers are still experimenting with the best approaches to eBooks in literature, let alone text books.

Students are leaping ahead of publishing companies. According to the New York Times, high cost of text books is a prime motivator for students exchanging electronic copies. Will publishers turn to strict DRM to stop this from harming profits?

Sales of SUVs of the PC world - stationary PCs - are being beaten out by the more energy efficient mobile PCs. Of course, this shift to the rise of mobile PCs has been happening for a while. What is different is the relevance to U.S. college students of a PC being energy efficient, contributing as little to environmental impact as possible from production to degradation, and hopefully from companies that participate in fair trade (or at least those working toward it).

Over the next several weeks entering college students will be introduced to the values of their new communities and enter into an action oriented environment around sustainability.  From contests between dorms to other campuses, many students will stop using trays in the cafeteria on certain days (or at all), counting the minutes they're in the shower to stay under 10 or 6 min, using the common dorm fridge instead of bringing mini-fridges, buying veggies locally (organic) or growing their own, composting, and yes, even counting the energy consumption on their PCs all to contribute to building a more sustainable environment.

Awareness and action by academics has increased from simple "reduce, reuse, recycle" plastic mugs for soda and coffee to signing pledges, like at Duke University and actively helping the campus install solar panels, like at Dickinson College. Tomorrow's New York Times has a great article detailing the movement on campuses across the U.S. and a new rating by Princeton Review.

Students and faculty working together to build more sustainable systems is serious business and not to be scoffed at as an idealistic dream. In order to maintain relevance to these leaders of sustainability and our future political and business leaders, PC and device manufacturers will need to be honest in their approach to the effort. Marketing gimmics won't fly, as this new effort is beyond, "we'll recycle your old PC," euphemism for they'll take it back and either resell it as refurbished or pay the dump fee.

Currently, students are making their PC decisions at a very practical level. I recently had the opportunity to visit well over a dozen colleges and prep schools and repeatedly heard students' comments supporting use of mobile PCs in context of energy, rather than convenience of using around campus. Here is a photo of a poster that I noticed in one hallway, which demonstrates the energy cost differences between average stationary PCs and mobile PCs:

Mobile PCs are a wonderful tool to aid in creating a more sustainable environment. Every school I visited mentioned that the students can now print on two sides of paper from network printers. Students commented on how much this has helped them reduce use of paper and network printer access means they don't have to bring their own printer. Paper is fundamental to many academic processes, even today, and it's good to see that this basic is not overlooked.

Of course, there can be even further efforts with PCs helping schools to be less dependent on paper.

There are also software features like being able to handwrite formulas, equations, and notes directly into Tablet PCs. This can be helpful for lab research, as well as individual course notes.

At an institution level there are Learning Management Systems that can help reduce the need to even print an assignment out. With an efficient LMS in place, students can post work electronically and faculty can access it. I noticed that schools use these at varying levels. Based on anecdotes only, this appeared to be based on training more than on the status of the technology available to the students.

Operationally, institutions can also standardize on hardware to help reuse pieces of PCs that are undergoing maintenance. Reuse a battery from a mobile PC that has a broken keyboard, for example. This is easier to do if the majority of equipment is the same.

I'll go into more detail around these in Part II. Also, we can go over needed improvements for tomorrow, such as battery duration, more eco-friendly plastics, and more energy efficient chipsets and processors.

Here is an updated list of case studies about mobile PCs with Tablet or Touch technology used in education.

Blackboard & Tegrity

Colorado Technical University - Sioux Falls

British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta)

Tablet PCs in schools: Case Study Report

• St Mary's RC Primary School
• Green Lane Infant School
• St Peter's CE (C) Primary School
• St Willibrord's Primary School
• Engayne Primary School
• St Francis RC Primary School
• Wylde Green Primary School
• Queensbury School
• Invicta Grammar School
• Cornwallis Technology College
• The Coleshill School
• Wilmslow High School

Tablet PCs in schools: A review of literature and selected projects

DyKnow

Auburn City Schools – Auburn, AL

Bishop Hartley High School – Columbus, OH

King’s Ridge Christian School – Atlanta, GA

North Daviess Elementary School – Elnora, IN

Park Tudor School – Indianapolis, IN

St Ursula Academy – Cincinnati, OH

DePauw University – Green Castle, IN

Joliet Junior College – Joliet, IL

Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology – Terre Haute, IN

University of Richmond – Richmond, VA

 

Fujitsu

DePaul Catholic High School & update – Wayne, NJ

Virginia Tech College of Engineering – Blacksburg, VA

 

MPC Corporation (previously Gateway)

Thomas Jefferson Independent Day School (KOAM) – Joplin, MO

U.S. Airforce Academy – Colorado Springs, CO

Winona State University - Winona, Minnesota

 

HP

Brookfield High School – Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Canutillo Middle School - Canutillo, TX

Culver Elementary School – Culver, OR

Denver School of Science and Technology – Denver, CO

Dunbar Primary School – Lufkin, TX

Grand Manan Community School – New Brunswick, Canada

International School of Brussels – Brussels, Belgium

J.A. Hughes Elementary School – Red Lake Falls, MN

Monte Cassino School – Tulsa, OK

Trinity School – Atlanta, GA

 

Grove City College – Grove City, PA

Northeast Wisconsin Technical College – Green Bay, WI

Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology – Terre Haute, IN

Universidad Technologica Nacional- Argentina

 

Lanway Corporate Business Systems

The Islay High School - Scottland

 

Microsoft

Arino-Alloza Rural School – Aragon, Spain

Bishop Hartley High School – Columbus, OH

Brookfield Zoo - Chicago, IL

Cincinnati Country Day School – Cincinnati, OH

Cornwallis School – Maidstone, Kent, UK

Crescent Girls’ School – Singapore

Frankston High School – Melbourne, Australia

Hoover City Schools – AL

Jefferson County Public Schools – Louisville, KY

Mulgrave School – West Vancouver, B.C., Canada

Northern Lights Public School – Aurora, Ontario, Canada

Ritsumeikan Primary School – Kyoto City, Japan

Torrey Pines High School – San Diego, CA

York Region District School Board – York Region, Ontario, Canada

 

Kansas State University – Manhattan, KS

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 4/2/2003 and 1/29/2005 - Cambridge, MA

Northeastern University College of Business Administration -

Politecnico Innovazione – Italy

Purdue University - IN

Republic Polytechnic of Singapore – Singapore

Rochester Institute of Technology - Rochester, NY

University of Iowa – Iowa City, IA

University of Toronto Medical School – Toronto, Canada

University of Vermont School of Business Administration – Burlington, VT

Winona State University - Winona, Minnesota

 

Motion Computing

Celebration High School - Austin, TX

 

National University of Ireland

Using Tablet PC for Electronic Mark-up of Assessments

 

RM

Cornwallis School - Kent, UK

Invicta Girls Grammar School - Kent, UK

St. Bartholomew’s School – Newbury, UK

 

Samsung

The Deans Primary School – Swinton, Salford, UK

 

TechLearning

Case Study: Learning with Tablet PCs, Bishop Hartley

 

Toshiba

Brophy College Prep - Phoenix, AZ - Video: 300K 110K

Greendale High School - Wisconsin

 

Purdue University – IN

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.