Richard Anderson - Interactive teaching with Tablet PCs at University of Washington

Posted By: scobleizer | Apr 5th, 2006 @ 2:10 PM

Recently I visited Richard Anderson's classroom at the University of Washington and watched how he used Tablet PCs to teach his computer science class. It is really cool. Students can send him notes, post their thoughts, and interact with him, via their Tablet PCs. This technology came out of Microsoft Research's ConferenceXP Project and the UW Classroom Presenter has a site which has more details and downloads too. The first minute of the video shows off his classroom then we start an interview with Richard and a few others who use or helped build the Classroom Presenter.

Tags: TabletPC

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Zeo
Channel 9 :)

Cool to see Tablet Pcs being used sucessfully in higher education!

Manip

I would expect to see grades go down...

I really would like to hear the advantages over paper and pen? ... The "combat shyness" statement is absurd. In work are they going to have anonymous table PCs in the board room? ...

Zeo
Channel 9 :)

Manip wrote:

I would expect to see grades go down...

I really would like to hear the advantages over paper and pen? ...

One big plus is spell check on the ink you write, that was a killer feature that helped me when I took tests with my tablet and made my essays more readable for my profs...which I'd argue made their lives easier and helped me get better grades. Big Smile

Manip

Zeo wrote:

Manip wrote:
I would expect to see grades go down...

I really would like to hear the advantages over paper and pen? ...

One big plus is spell check on the ink you write, that was a killer feature that helped me when I took tests with my tablet and made my essays more readable for my profs...which I'd argue made their lives easier and helped me get better grades.

It might have been a long time since you were at University but today they don't accept hand written essays at all and you aren't expected to write them in class either.

Some exams are computerised, some aren't... But either way that isn't graded as long as they can understand what your trying to say.

Zeo
Channel 9 :)

Manip wrote:

Zeo wrote:

Manip wrote:
I would expect to see grades go down...

I really would like to hear the advantages over paper and pen? ...

One big plus is spell check on the ink you write, that was a killer feature that helped me when I took tests with my tablet and made my essays more readable for my profs...which I'd argue made their lives easier and helped me get better grades.

It might have been a long time since you were at University but today they don't accept hand written essays at all and you aren't expected to write them in class either.

Some exams are computerised, some aren't... But either way that isn't graded as long as they can understand what your trying to say.

I graduated from University last year...so it hasn't been that long.

And yes when I had to take exams during the class periods we had to write out lengthy lengthy essays especially during exams(3 hours) so I talked with my professors extensively and gained permission to use my toshiba tablet in 3 of my classes(I was taking 7).

And I had one CS professor who actually deduced "syntax" points on exams because he believed that if you spelling was just as important as proper C++.

He was a real hardass but I learned alot and he saw the benefit of having students take exams on tablets.

jorgen_veisdal
http://jveisdal.com

Fantastic initiative, we want more of this!

That guy sure knows how to say "you know" alot:P

koorb

Manip wrote:

I would expect to see grades go down...

I really would like to hear the advantages over paper and pen? ... The "combat shyness" statement is absurd. In work are they going to have anonymous table PCs in the board room? ...

Of course grades will benefit because it is engaged learning.

scobleizer
I'm the video guy

There are four schools in France that are using Tablet PCs too. Here's an article on that (in French): http://www.tabletpccorner.net/revue_96.html

papavb

I know this is the obvious question , but are the large amounts of money it takes to furnish schools with this cool tech worth the end product.

And maybe it is because books would cost a lot less if they weren't printed but pdf'ed (I copyrighted that by the way) + less trees would die everyone wins.

Ijust answered myself sry. I think tablets are a plausible future