Tablet PC Workshop was a SUCCESS

On Feb. 8, Dr. Ananda Gunawardena, of Carnegie Mellon University presented a workshop entitled: "Creating an Interactive Tablet PC Classroom" at PETE&C, the Pennsylvania Educational Technology Expo and Conference in Hershey, PA. For more information contact guna@andrew.cmu.edu



The attendees were mostly K-12 school administration, tech coordinators and some teachers. They were given hands on activities on how best to use a tablet pc in the classroom. Most already had tablets in their schools but were using them as laptops. We were able to show the amazing capabilities of a tablet PC classroom.Several methods were discussed to show low start up cost. Here are the possible ways to start:

I) Instructor using Tablet PC as an interactive device, converting any document into a journal document and annotating in class. Leave room for class activities. At the end of the session, convert the document to PDF (use CutePDF free converter) and place it online for students to see.

2) If they are in Tablet PC classroom/lab use one of two products to make the class more interactive.
a) Classroom presenter (CP) -- instructor can convert PPT to CP deck and annotate in class. Students receive annotations real time. Students can respond to questions and send answers back to instructor. Instructors can discuss good and bad responses. CP also has a clicker system where students can respond to questions raised during class. Instructor can see immediately class responses. Good for classes size 20 or less to reduce the demand on network bandwidth.
b) Lemon Sketch -- designed as a shared canvas intended for small group collaboration. Ideal for groups of size 4 or less. Ideal for 1 -1 remote tutoring session. Both parties share the same canvas and solve the problem together like they are sitting next to each other. Successfully used in a pilot program in autism.
c) Tablet Flash Cards -- Each member of the audience created a sample deck and shared with others. These decks were expanded by others in the group.
d) Several other programs, such as Tablet Math Whiz and Classroom Salon were demonstrated.

The audience suggested many applications where Tablets can be used effectively with this software.

Software Presented:


Adaptive Book -- an electronic textbook system with a very robust markup manager. Students are able to annotate, highlight, and share their markups with other students or with the teacher. Using the Markup Analysis Tool, students can also compare their markups against markups done by expert users. Adaptive book is a great tool to use for reading interactive digital books. Copyright: Carnegie Mellon University/TextCentric, Inc


Classroom presenter (CP) -- a program developed at University of Washington to enable classroom interaction during the lecture. Instead of using a static Powerpoint slides, teachers can import a Powerpoint deck into CP and use it to conduct an interactive classroom using pen annotations. Furthermore, if students also have tablets, teacher can post a question and receive students written responses in real time. These results can be discussed further during lectures. The CP also has real time polling so teachers can get a sense of how things are going in class.
Copyright: University of Washington

Doodle -- a movie annotation system in its alpha version. Doodle uses windows Media video (WMV) files. Doodle is intended as a classroom tool where teachers can annotate a video while it is playing or when it is in pause mode. All annotations can be saved, shared and played back later.
Copyright: Carnegie Mellon University


Tablet Flash Cards -- application was developed to provide students with a pen-based environment for creating flash cards on the computer. Flash card user interface is designed , developed and tested using many real user studies to optimize the usability of the product. Teachers can create card decks and share them with students. Students can also create decks and share them with other students. Learning with Flash cards is a proven learning technique and Tablet Flash cards make the process of making, using and sharing flash cards so much easier.
Copyright: Carnegie Mellon University

Graph Animator -- a fun program developed for Tablet PC’s to show how to draw a graph, one with nodes and edges that connect them. Nodes can be say cities and edges can be roads. The cool part of this program is you can assign edge weight (or distance between two cities) to each edge, select an origin and destination and watch to see how it finds the shortest path between the two points.
Copyright: Carnegie Mellon University

Infinite Canvas -- a novel application developed using latest windows technologies such as WPF. The infinite canvas allows users to write anything on a canvas assuming there is infinite space to write. There are no page boundaries or menu items. The interface is simple. The interface can also be customized to include frequently used images to be included in the canvas. The navigation to previously written content is done by using the left navigation strip that provides a thumbnail view of the written content
Copyright: Carnegie Mellon University

Ink Book -- an effort to integrate a flexible platform for reading electronic textbooks on Tablet PC environments. The book is designed with a simple user interface with text on left and an ink pad on right. Ink pad allows users to take notes and tie specific parts of the text to the annotations. Specific focus is on the usability aspect of the application.
Copyright: Carnegie Mellon University

Lemon Sketch -- an innovative collaborative peer-to-peer software platform for encouraging small group collaboration. One user launch the application and the user’s computer serve as the host server for the group. Other users join the group using host server IP address. All users share the same canvas, where each user can write on and erase on other persons canvas.
Copyright: Carnegie Mellon University

Mapper -- a design environment for drawing multi-dimensional worlds using pen sketches and gestures.
Copyright: Carnegie Mellon University

Classroom Salon -- a novel online program designed to support classroom reading assignments. Users receive questions from the instructor and respond to them using annotations. All annotations are then compared and presented in a grid so students and professors can understand what students are annotating as a group. The program also displays hot annotated areas in the document making it easier to identify and understand the annotations of a group.
Copyright: Carnegie Mellon University

Sudoku -- the famous game designed for tablet PC’s. Although there are some similar applications in the market for Sudoku, this particular application is designed and developed at CMU using multiple user testing done with solid human computer interaction (HCI) studies to increase the usability of the platform.
Copyright: Carnegie Mellon University

Tablet Math Whiz 1.0 -- a comprehensive system designed and developed for testing and practicing basic math skills. Tablet Math Whiz is a system that contains a Tablet PC based client application as well as a web based application for managing classroom assignments. Teachers can assign Math activities, students can log in and complete them, and all handwritten annotations are automatically graded by the system. The system captures handwritten work and save them in an online repository for teachers to compare. Students can complete assigned homework or do self practice of Math problems. Grade sheets can be exported as excel. No grading. Students love using this intuitive system. Doing Math is fun, finally.
Copyright: Carnegie Mellon University

Tablet Math Whiz 2.0 -- is an enhanced version of its popular predecessor Tablet Math Whiz 1.0. The program is designed for practicing basic math skills. This version contains a basic game interface done in flash (some games under construction) that allows students to practice Math in a gaming environment. The game serves as a motivational tool for students. The web interface was also improved so that teachers can author their own problems. Now teachers can assign problems selected by the system (teachers specify the criteria) or problems authored by them. Both Tablet PC application interface and web interface are improved for this version.
Copyright: Carnegie Mellon University

Cursive handwriting Recognizer -- a fun program intended to teach how to write cursive handwriting [20]. The program comes with a practice mode, test mode and gaming mode.
Copyright: Carnegie Mellon University

Physics Illustrator --Bring your drawings to life with the Physics Illustrator, a motion simulator for the Tablet PC. Simply draw two-dimensional bodies, connect them in various ways and apply forces, then watch as animation makes the bodies’ move, collide, and interact.
Copyright: MIT/Microsoft