TabletPCs Outside the Classroom

In a school with a "triple threat" (teaching, coaching, and dorm residence), it's not surprising that our teachers have found innovative uses for the TabletPC outside the classroom. In our TabletPC Users Group meeting this past week, Math instructor Karen Geary showed us how she uses the TabletPC to coach field hockey. She has found it indispensible for preparing for practices and maintaining "institutional" coaching knowledge, such as the routes for practice runs. See an image at left that Karen created just using OneNote. Keeping track of what her team did in practice last season has been very helpful this season!

Karen also used GoogleEarth to create practice run routes and posted them for new kids (and new coaches) so they'd know where to go when she called for a particular run. See below for an example.

As a dorm affiliate, I can also think of ways I might use the tablet to do check in, to run dorm meetings, room selection, proctor selection and so much more. I think that flexibility to environment is one of the strengths of mobile computing in general and the tablet platform in particular. I also know I've started to find a million ways to use my tablet for all the areas of my life. It seems silly not to take advantage of the ease of use for doing research (URL is pasted in along with the text you copy in OneNote), compiling notes for a piece of writing, and searchability and convenience of having everything in one place. Now how exactly did I get along without this little device before? My only wish: somehow make it run all day on battery, let it be light enough to hold in one hand comfortably, and configure it so that it is small enough to fit in my pocket, but so my old eyes can still read it. A design challenge?

Siftables

Check out this cool demo on TED.

Mathematica

A few of our math teachers attended a conference recently to refine their use of Mathematica, a Wolfram product, that offers a wealth of opportunities for classroom use, both in the Math and Science departments. Here are a few comments from one of the attendees, Math instructor Masami Stahr:

I was a novice user to Mathematica, and I am not quite efficient using it yet,
but I started using the software to integrate problem-solving skill with
visualization, especially 3-D graphs. Students generally understand better
when they can see the problems. The Mathematica website has a lot of
demo projects that I can download and then modify them to suit my
usage. This can be done without extensive knowledge of Mathematica.
To get more proficient, I will try to spend more time on Mathematica next
summer in hopes of further incorporating this software into the Exeter
Math curriculum. I am quite excited to use this flexible software in my
classroom and look forward to finding more creative ways to enhance student
learning.