Facebook question on "tablets"

A friend asked the following on Facebook so I thought I'd provide my response to promote discussion more generally.

Who all is in a one-to-one tablet school? How's that going? Use them daily? Weekly? Monthly? Blue-moonly? Curious if the tablets are making a difference or just a thing.

I'm going to make the distinction between a tablet (iPad or Android slab) and a tabletPC (Microsoft Surface Pro or Dell Latitude, amongst others). The former are really personal consumption devices and their long-term viability in a classroom are limited relative to the latter, which are desktop replacements. You will likely see more success through implementing BYOD with student personal mobile devices (i.e. smartphones) than with a 1:1 slab program.

We only saw intensive & continual up-take and use of technology by faculty & students when we moved to a pen-based tabletPC which allowed for free-form input (i.e. "writing") on a digital surface with sufficient computing power to keep up with mathematical work and allowed for easy movement of ideas and digital content (ink, text, images, audio, video) between applications. (I would emphasize that Microsoft OneNote helped create the environment to facilitate this process).

Once students & faculty could treat their tabletPC as we would paper, almost all our content is digital -- this means it can be shared and collaborated on with ease. So groupwork is not based on physical or temporal proximity (although really, it still is but we are no longer constrained). Neither does feedback depend on a physical or temporal imposition -- I can add suggestions to a student's work when I am free to do so, not by collecting their work from them since everything is in the same "cloud".

What about Chromebooks?

The challenge with Chromebooks (and any non-inking-device) is that mathematics is not meant to be typed. To do mathematics is to doodle & sketch -- and you need to have digital ink to allow that free form input. They may help to change the learning space in humanities & languages but in the maths and sciences they're less likely to have an effect.

Having said all that, starting the process of experimenting with teaching and learning with technology is the right step .. use what you have. But I think it's important to recognize the desire of mathematics to be free and not limited to the device's nature. :)

Comments

Desmos, OneNote & Replay

So using Desmos activities are a great way to encourage exploration and discussion in math class -- if you haven't tried them, I encourage it. They're collected at https://teacher.desmos.com/ But ... Desmos doesn't give you quite enough. It doesn't have a way of capturing the work that the student does within their space, and it doesn't allow for annotation of class contributions as we come together to discuss. Well, not surprisingly, OneNote comes to the rescue. Using the Windows shortcut Windows-Shift-S it is really quick to snag the Desmos screen and pop it into a waiting OneNote page. From there, we can grab our pen and (using wireless projection) talk about what all the different responses mean and where to go from there. (An aside : one of the nice features of Desmos activities are the way you can hit PAUSE and it will pause all the screens of the students working. I always give them a heads up "10 seconds to pause..." and it's...

So you want to hack your OneNote Class Notebook

Taking a brief break from my "Getting Started with OneNote Class Notebook" series (you can start that one here )... This is a little advanced so if you're not comfortable setting permissions inside of Office365 you may want to avoid this. Or set up a Class Notebook to play with so that it doesn't affect any existing Class Notebooks. Yeah, the latter is a good option. One of the great powers of OneNote is that you can do some really neat permissioning of the Section Tabs. When the Notebook is created, of course, it gives you an "open permissions" on the Collaboration Space and student-read-only on the Content Library. And then each student space is wide open to each individual student. But we've found that occasionally you want to mix up the permissions a little. For example, you could create a space in a student section for your private notes that the student couldn't see, or maybe you want a tab in the Collaboration Space that students cou...

Making your own font

Slid in amongst all the announcements for Ignite, Microsoft's big conference in September, as a tool that I thought was quite cool. Not original, since similar things have existed elsewhere & when, but a nice option nevertheless. Microsoft's Font Maker allows you to create your own font using digital ink. You get all 26 characters, numbers and punctuation (for English languages) on which you draw your font for each character. (For me, it's the first 128 printable characters out of the ASCII table!) Using your #digitalink pen, you draw out what you want each character to look like. I just quickly wrote out the alphabet as you can see below: You don't have to do it all at once and you can keep working on your Font as you go; it saves as a JSON Project File which means you can send these between collaborators. Once you have your font done, you can adjust the spacing between characters & words to make it look good (it uses a scene from Hamlet -- I...

Continuous formation

Search This Blog