General+Thoughts+on+the+Tablet+PC

Please write your thoughts on the Tablet PC.

Last year when we met with the teacher from MICDS in St. Louis, the tablets sounded awesome. The DYNO software amazed me, and I thought it would be a great way to go; however, after my department purchased an iPad in the spring, and I had become accustomed to it, the tablet PC seemed like a dinosaur! It was heavy, bulky, outdated, and took FOREVER to load-up, etc.

In my mind, many of the MS students would loathe these things.

After using it initially, it sat on my dining room table, and I really had a physical reaction to it -- I didn't want to turn it on again or even pick it up.

In my experience, a very small percentage of 7th grade students use PCs. The overwhelming majority of students who bring in computers bring iPads or Macbooks. While I still slightly prefer my Macbook to an iPad, it makes much more sense to me to stay with a Mac product in the MS.

-I felt very comfortable using the tablet because it is so similar to my laptop. The ONE thing I want to try, but couldn't, was using it with Dyno...so, I pretty much used it as a lighterPC alternative to my laptop.

I have used the tablet to present at conferences and also toying around in and out of class. It's a great piece of technology, and you can do some pretty cool stuff with the drawing aspect of it. The Dyno, is cool, but that kind of interactivity can be done on almost any platform or piece of hardware - there's an app for it. It is an awesome laptop, but very expensive - too expensive in my mind. Middle schoolers can do EVERYTHING they want and need with a less expensive notebook, like a MacBook.

At first I simply used the tablet as a substitute laptop since mine was under repair. I found the tablet to be a smaller version of my PC laptop, and I was glad to have it to use. The tablet didn't seem as "cool" as the iPad, but it did seem to be a small, quick, useable laptop. Like others among my colleagues I was quite reluctant to try the tablet further after the joy of my beloved iPad. Being (at heart) of scientific mind, however, I finally decided that I should give the tablet's "tablet" features a try. After booting the tablet up (which went surprisingly quick), I turned the screen around, took out the stylus, opened OneNote and.... began to have tons of fun! I wrote, drew and hi-lighted. I copied and inserted text and images from a website with citation. I added sound. It was great! Just as handy and useful as the iPad -if not more so due to its ability to easily create and edit documents like a regular laptop, as well as its ability to view all the websites that I use, including those that use flash. The thoughts and conclusions: After playing around with a tablet, I think that students would definitely be hooked! The tablet does everything a laptop does; it has every convenience. The addition of the stylus gives the tablet the extra functionality and "ease of use" that many of us enjoy in the touchscreen feature of the iPad. Because of tools like smart phones, iPads, and handheld gaming devices with styluses, our students are starting to become used to touchscreen interfaces in their technology. As such, the tablet feels like a friend, (almost like everything that I wished my Nintendo DS was!) So, would I be happy with iPads? Yes! Would I be pleased as punch with MacBooks? Yes! Still, I firmly believe that the tablet is not being given its due. The tablet is an amazing tool that combines many of the best elements of both! I am neither a die-hard Mac or PC fan. I have used, owned and enjoyed both. I understand wanting to keep costs down. Still, the fact remains that I completely wrote and edited this entry by hand, using the stylus on my tablet -- and it was AWESOME!

--- I simply do not think the tablet PC is worth the hefty price tag. In my classroom, I would not use the tablet-specific features enough to justify the cost of such a device. And if I were a parent buying one, I would not be happy at all to find that the tablet was being used for the same stuff a cheaper MacBook could have been used for.

As an earlier post remarked, I do think that the tablet PC seems bulky and slow compared to what our students are used to working with. I am also not sure how crazy the students will go for the stylus. I know that as adults who grew up handwriting, we like to write with the stylus, but our kids aren't growing up the same way. I'm not sure they miss the pen as much as we do.

For 8th grade and US, I am all for a university model. 100%. If that is not an option at all in the MS, then I would be pro-MacBook and anti-tablet.

Tablet PC - When I got mine I turned it on and was first struck by how long the start up time was compared to the iPad I had the previous weeks; this was the first of many strikes against this machine. This got me thinking how hard it would be to integrate this tech into quick tasks in the classroom. If the start up and login process would take this long it might not be as handy for those quick tasks that the iPad2 would be good at. As for the software and the overall functionality I don’t think this would be as useful to our Middle school student body. I think that something like a macbook would be far superior for the types of activities that we run in our classrooms. From iMovie, iPhoto, Pages, Numbers, iWeb and so on... My vote is a BIG no on these machines.