What would you demo at an education conference?

Matthew Cosier shows off the Tablet PC at the Victorian Information Technology Teachers Association (Vitta) Conference underway down under. The intent of the conference is to explore IT from a primary and secondary school perspective. Yep, sounds like a great opportunity to showcase the Tablet.

So far Matthew’s been relying on Journal. As he blogs, OneNote would be a great app to demo too. I also posted on his blog a couple other apps that he might want to consider. Of course, I can’t encourage him enough to try out MathPractice. It’s so easy for people to use that they often “get it” when you let them try the program out.

Matthew also contemplates the whole “is handwriting faster than typing” argument. Actually, I find that most people can type faster….if they are typing words, that is. Try typing an equation. Or a geometry problem. Or a kreb cycle in biology. Or a football play (hehe, Soccer or American style). It all depends what you’re doing. For these cases, the pen is almost always more effective and faster. And then what about annotating? Again, the pen wins out in my book.

For students, however, there’s a whole other reason that I think the pen should be winning out in school settings–it reinforces skills that students will have to use when the taking exams (or use out of school, of course). When a student takes an exam, they aren’t going to be typing (at least for the foreseeable future). They are going to be handwriting. They are going to be solving math problems by hand. They are going to be writing essays by hand. I strongly believe that students that practice working out problems long hand will have an advantage over those that don’t in these cases. Now if tests were done on the keyboard, I’d give the edge to the keyboard.

OK. So you might say, if working problems longhand is so great, why use a Tablet at all then? It’s because you can leverage the power of the computer to give feedback to the students while they are working through problems. MathPractice is a great example here.

Lastly, one thing that has surprised me about the Tablet PC is that teachers and administrators catch on fast in terms of the value of the Tablet. Sometimes faster than the students. I think part of the reason is that most of them are not desk bound. They can envision themselves filling out a seating chart while standing up. They can see themselves planning a presentation or assignment in ink. They can appreciate the convenience and time it might save them to electronically grade papers in ink.