Teaching, Technology, and Learning

This is a great example of what you can do in an educational setting if all of your students have tablet PC's and OneNote:

http://blogs.msdn.com/onenote_and_education/archive/2008/10/17/onenote-a...

Today, it's a pipe dream at my university to consider a scenario where every student has a tablet PC. One can still dream though! Aside from saving paper, it would open up a huge number of new learning possibilities. In addition to the electronic portfolios, a sample of new activities that would be possible include:

- collaborative note-taking
- real-time lecture/screen sharing/student submission of work in class
- electronic grading
- electronic lab book
- integration of distance and in-class lectures

I've updated my PenAttention program to v1.2. See PenAttention for a description of the original program. The changes are:

1) Dialog box that allows the user to set the opacity, radius of the highlight, and color of the highlight.

2) An option to highlight the mouse in addition to the pen.

3) Fixed issues causing flickering and strange refresh behavior in some applications (e.g. PowerPoint presentation mode, Sticky Notes, PDF Annotator).

Thanks everyone for your feedback, interest, and support for this program!

To download the installer for this program click the link below:

I've updated my program to automatically enable/disable the touch scrollers on the OQO Model 02/e2. The original program was described here:
http://www.math.uaa.alaska.edu/~afkjm/techteach/?q=node/50

The program was created so a right-handed user can ink with the pen without accidentally hitting the touch scrollers with your palm.

Update 5/10/08:An updated version of this program is available that fixes the bugs described in this post.

I've been using my Tablet PC to deliver lectures for years, and I love having the ability to record lectures, mark-up PowerPoint, and write by hand using OneNote. However, it's always bothered me that the pen cursor is a tiny little dot. An example is shown below from OneNote:

Previously I wrote about inkbook, a note-taking program for the Mac and perfect for the modbook. There's a great discussion on jkontherun about other note-taking programs, specifically curio.

The thread is here: http://www.jkontherun.com/2008/03/is-curio-the-an.html

OneNote is probably the pen-enabled application I use the most on my Tablet PC. I use it for delivering lectures and taking notes in meetings. For others, it might be Journal, Evernote, GoBinder, or some other note-taking application.

If you're considering the purchase of a modbook (or waiting for the rumored Mac Tablet) then you'll probably want some type of note-taking app for OS X. Mage Software's inkBook might be just the ticket. It supports all sorts of pens, brushes, and highlighters along with searching of notes using inkwell's handwriting recognition. You can also copy and paste and print to PDF.

Last semester I used OneNote's shared sessions as a way for my class to collaborate among groups during an in-class group exercise. If you're not familar with this feature of OneNote, it's basically a way to share the same notebook with multiple computers. Any of the participants can modify the notebook, add new pages, etc. and the results are broadcast to all participants in near real-time.

It's pretty easy to set up. More information on setting up shared sessions is here: http://personal-computer-tutor.com/abc4/v38/kath38o.htm

I met a middle school math teacher today that uses a tablet in his classroom. He has quite a nice setup with a wireless projector and Promethean board with voting clickers. One thing that struck me was his preference of using Journal over OneNote. His main reason was that in Journal he had the option to save and overwrite his notes, while OneNote is constantly saving.

Why? He makes a template of the lesson before class in Journal, marks it up during class, then cancels saving at the end. This preserves his original template and it can be used again for the next class.

In OneNote, he would have to make a copy of the OneNote file or erase all the added ink from the class session.