In 2007 we began using tablet computers with our Year 7 students. Annotating PowerPoint presentations, marking student work electronically, modelling effective research technique by highlighting relevant text and showing students correct setting out of algorithms were some of the ways that teachers and students utilised the stylus immediately. Exploring the tablet utilities which come as extras, the snipping tool, art applications and sticky notes became popular.
Perhaps the biggest change came when people started using OneNote. As a research organiser, collaborating tool, worksheet creator and simple notemaker, it has wide ranging functionailty. Apart from text, you can embed sound, pictures and video and easily manipulate the page layout by dragging and dropping the 'textbox' like objects. It is easy to use as a repository for important emails and other documents by printing or sending to OneNote. Students can share their 'notebook' when working on collaborative projects, in that sense working like a simple wiki.
Microsoft have prepared a range of how to movies and useful resources for teachers packaged in this dowloadable toolkit, but the best way to learn more is possibly to visit this blog or watch the helpful video at Teacher Tube
3 comments:
Hi Heath,
We have just taken delivery of 6 wireless (blue tooth) WACOM tablets at my school. We are planning to use them mostly to do the same type of thing you do on an IWB (but remotely rather than from the board) The tablets work well with Activstudio (our IWB software). Do you think there are benefits to getting Onenote as well? Is ther anything Onenote can do that typical IWB software cannot do?
Thanks for your question Pascale. We have smartboards in our Junior Primary classrooms but not in the upper primary where I am teaching. Therefore my experience with the type of software that you mention here is limted to a couple of workshops presented by other teachers. From what I saw, the smartboard software is very good for creating resources for presentation and small group activities where students use the board. Perhaps the advantage of having OneNote is that the students have access to their own mini-version of a smartboard? We are looking
http://classroompresenter.cs.washington.edu/
as a tool for doing smartboard type presentations using the tablets.
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