Tablet PCs in Education

Imagine – you are studying for a final and find an item on the syllabus you just don’t recall. That day your mind was off in space for one reason or another. You open a browser and search across the professor’s class notes. You see the material from that day, highlight a specific bullet point and click “play”. An audio/video stream opens starting from the point in time on the day in class when the professor took that note. You listen/watch the playback to make sure you get it right, actually learning something you otherwise would have missed.

Students today are doing that thanks to Tablet PC, OneNote, and SharePoint Server.

More and more I see Tablet PCs showing up in Higher Education. I met with a major University last week to discuss Tablet PCs in the classroom and how professors are using Tablets as presentation tools. I got an interesting link from one of our presenters:

https://www.studenttabletpc.com/

The group discussed a lot of interesting tools including the Tablet Education Pack and OneNote. It was great to see several professors already using Tablets to provide notes and illustrations on top of PowerPoint. I have also talked to a couple of major Universities now that leverage software to capture lectures using streaming video of the presenter in combination with OneNote. I’ve even talked to a group that publishes the material all the way out to Windows Mobile devices and Xbox 360. Cool!