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?