Well, Winter term has officially begun, despite, or perhaps because of sleet, snow, ice, power outages, and all sorts of other gifts from Mother Nature in the past few weeks. As of this term, we have deployed about 70 tablets to our teachers (about 50% of the faculty) with generally satisfactory--and sometime extremely satisfactory--reception.
I have continued using my tablet, this time to teach web design. There are a few wrinkles: to figure out the most efficient way to access some things across the wireless network, how to show students what they need to do from an environment that is different, for starters. But it is already clear to me that the advantages thoroughly outweigh the disadvantages.
Here's today's epiphany: I am in a new classroom now that is equipped with a wireless projector, and today, as I began to stand to write something on the board, it occurred to me that I could just project it from the tablet without moving, and "voilà" there it was. At first, I asked myself, "Why does it matter if I use the tablet instead of the board?" But then I realized that if a student misses a class, I will have a record of what we covered in OneNote and can pretty easily replicate the missed class with the student. Very cool.
