merrimack college 05/18/05 the role of tablet pc in education ananda gunawardena associate teaching...

Merrimack College05/18/05

The Role of Tablet PC in Education

Ananda Gunawardena

Associate teaching Professor

School of Computer Science

Carnegie Mellon University


Talk Outline

• Introduction• Challenges• Use of tablet as a classroom teaching

tool • Student view of tablet PC • Tablet Advantage • Lessons learned from pilots • Q & A


Introduction• History of Tablet Computing• Makers of Tablets

– HP, Acer, Toshiba, Motion Computing etc..

• Microsoft Commitment– Hardware– Software advances

• HP Tablets TC1000, TC1100 and TC4200– TC 1100– TC 4200


Tablet PC Hardware

• HP Hardware used in CMU and other tablet studies– Distinct advantages

– Student behavior changes

• Current HP model tc1100– Standard features:10.4-inch screen,3.1 lbs,

1.1Ghz,256MB DDR,802.11 bg wireless

• Most tablets have Wacom digitizer, pressure sensitive sketching


Challenges


Microsoft Tablet PC Focus Group 04• Many questions need to be answered. Among them are:

– What are the ultimate outcomes for computing education? – How does the Tablet PC change the interaction between teacher

and student, and how will this impact classroom pedagogy? – How does this new type of interaction affect course content and

the computing curriculum? – Are these new pedagogies and strategies applicable to other

disciplines? – What are the differences between classes in which only the teacher

uses a Tablet PC and classes in which all of the students also use one?

– Are there replicable strategies, tools, and techniques that can scale across large numbers of teachers and students?


Problem Statements

• Value of Ink and Mobility. We need to establish that software based on digital ink is sufficiently compelling in education to enable wide spread adoption. We must show that ink and mobility provide significant value both to students and to instructors. It is also important to show the technology adoption path—how individual adopters gain value, and then how networking effect when there is broad adoption.


Problem Statements

• Research Agenda. Basic note taking and presentation programs have already been successfully deployed. But, there is interesting research to be done that will promote wider deployment by enabling the use of digital ink in the next generation of education software. We need to reexamine in the context of the Tablet PC the good academic research that was conducted in the last 20 years on pen-based computing and collaborative programs. The availability of the Tablet PC platform finally makes it possible to apply this research to actual learning environments and to obtain real assessment data.


Problem Statements

• Enabling Technology. Soon, wireless networking will become widely available and easy to use. The price of Tablet PCs will continue to decline—making the price differential between a Tablet PC and a laptop relatively small. Or, adding a digitizer to a laptop will be a low cost option (much the same as adding a network card). The tighter integration of Microsoft® Windows® XP Tablet PC Edition with the Windows operating system is a step in this direction. When more user software becomes available, the demand for and ubiquity of Tablet PCs will increase—producing a snowball effect much like that seen in the early days of PCs.


Long Range Vision

Mobility in Education vision: How does widespread use of mobile devices such as Tablet PCs, in and out of the classroom, impact classroom interaction and pedagogy and positively change the way students and teachers interact?


Long Range Vision

Digital Ink Communication vision: What role does digital ink play in educational software? How is it superior to chalkboard “ink”? Will students’ ability to “produce and share” ink in the classroom positively effect the learning environment? How does it change the way both teachers and students engage in the learning process? Obviously, we believe Tablet PCs (and other pen-based devices) will influence these processes in significant ways.


Teacher Advantages

• Dynamic Documents – Electronic Books – (CMU, Hope College)

• Dynamic Documents – Learning Communities (CMU)

• Classroom Presentation ( UW)• Accessibility (LiveNotes UC - Berkeley) • Electronic Classrooms (classroom 2000 Georgia

Tech)• Lecture Capture (ActiveCampus project –

UCSD)


Teacher Advantages

• Collaborative Applications – NotePals (Richard Davis, UC Berkeley and

James Landay, Univ of Washington) – ReMarkable Texts (Andy VanDam, Brown)

• Paper Grading – DUPLEX (Jeff Popyack, Drexel University


Learner Advantages• Document Creation

– study notes, term papers, and problem sets. Much of this work is collaborative and informal

• Digital Documents – archiving, retrieval, analysis, sharing, and conversion to

other formats • Ink-Based Document Creation

– oneNote, Journal• Sketch-Based Prototyping

– quick way of capturing, communicating and refining ideas

• Ink Understanding.


Research Challenges

• Pen-Centric UI

• What is a Natural UI?

• Systems and Network Issues

• Domain-Specific Ink Applications

• Other Forms of Digital Ink – work on Tabletop groupware is being done (M.

Ringel Morris, Stanford)


Tablet PC PilotsLessons Learned


CMU Tablet PC Pilot Sites• San Jose State University

– Business School

• The Ellis School– Eighth Grade Geometry

• Mt Lebanon High School– Organic Chemistry and Physics

• CMU– Computer Science

• Grove City College– Large deployment of HP tablets


Use of Tablet as a Teaching Tool• Main Advantages

– Use of ink to make class more interactive– Use power point slides with open ended slides

• Slow down the pace of the lecture

– Convert any document into a windows journal and annotate

– Portability– Wireless Advantage

• Remote desktop


Use of Tablet as a Teaching Tool• Smart Board vs Tablet• Powerpoint

– Can directly annotate– Save (careful here), make extra copies

• Windows Journal– Annotate the documents– View multiple pages at a time– Save as annotated document as a pdf (some problems)– Keep the document to less than 10 pages– Demos

• CMS• http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/15-100mooseNsquirrel/

lecturenotes.html


Instructor Comments• “I used it for classroom presentations,

primarily using PowerPoint slides, but sometimes taking Word documents, web pages and / or source code, converting them to journal format and marking them up... I then e-mailed these marked up documents to the students for their future reference... “


Instructor Comments• “We had worksheet-style homework

assignments, originally web-documents or Word documents that the students converted to journal format and marked up with their answers... They then sent their responses to me via e-mail attachments... I opened them on my tablet and marked up their answers, e-mailing the corrected documents back... (I thought this was the most interesting thing I did...) “


Instructor Comments• “I learned too late the value of creating

markups of the text and my slides to be distributed to the students as part of the course presentation... What is tricky is getting the students to do a set of mark-ups first, and not just waiting for the instructor's sets... What seemed to work was having the students submit their markups, and then I sent them my set... “


Note Taking • 50%-60% took notes in class

– Note taking is beneficial • Writing is better than typing

– Higher participation when open slides are provided• 30%-40% referred to instructors annotated notes after class

– Most found them to be useful studying for exams– Students reminded me when postings were delayed– Some can annotate so you can almost follow the

sequence of annotations– Any annotated slide is better than nothing, however, it

is good to be clean if you are planning to save annotations


Student Perceptions What are the major advantages (if any)

of a Table PC over a regular laptop?– A. Can annotate professor’s notes directly on the computer.

– B. If you had courses that required a lot of note taking then it might be more useful.

– C. Lighter than a regular laptop – more likely to carry it around

– D. Better battery life


Student Perceptions In terms of being a student, did the

Tablet make anything easier to do? Did it facilitate your learning in any way? – A. One found it easier to read on the screen because the position of

the screen could be manipulated.

– B. A person reported that her courses had a lot of reading material that was available online, she said it saved her a lot of time and effort to be able to read on the machine rather than have to print everything out.


Student Perceptions• Did it change the way you participated

in class or how you studied?– - Depends on the instructor– - If instructor provided adequate notes well integrated with the

homework assignments, Most students did not take notes in class

• What about the note taking or drawing capability – is this useful to your learning or work? How many used the tablet feature in CS class or other classesA. No one used this feature beyond the initial classes. One tried to use

it in math class but it was too much work so he went back to taking notes on paper.

B. Wasn’t easy (was cumbersome) to integrate drawing with typing


Student Perceptions What are the disadvantages of a Tablet PC compared

to a laptop?• A. The pen is poorly designed.

– a. It is too sensitive– b. Too hard to click– c. Not user friendly

• B. Keyboard is too small – often hit more than one key• C. The monitor is badly designed

– a. The monitor is too small– b. The monitor wobbles (in the up position) when you try to write on it

• D. Lack of a CD player• E. The one potential advantage – converting handwritten notes to

text – didn’t work. The conversion was very inaccurate.


Student Perceptions• How would you redesign the tablet or what features would you have to make it a

more useful machine (what would it have to have or do for you to use it as your primary machine?

• A. Redesign Screen (all students)– a. Needs to be bigger– b. Eyestrain trying to read the monitor– c. Need a locking mechanism so it won’t wobble when you write on it– d. Screen isn’t well protected– e. Better way to switch from writing to keyboard

• B. Bigger keyboard (all students)– a. The “nub” is too close to the “B”. Would often hit “B” in error – b. Click vs. space – keyboard too compact

• C. Much better pen (majority of students)– a. Improve the interface– b. Better erase function

• D. Improved text conversion• E. More attractive (“it is not a nice looking machine”)


Tablet Advantage

Mobility and Ink


Mobility

• Easy to carry– Many students reported carrying Tablet to

Classes– Field Experiments (UC Monterry)

• Connectivity– Anytime, anywhere


Specialized Software• Classroom Presenter (UW)• Physics Illustrator (MIT)

– Early work into what’s possible with Tablet

• 3D Journal (Cornell)– 3d sketching and manipulation

• Adaptive Book (CMU)– Textbook content and markup management system

• Pragma (CMU)– Development of generic set of sketch recognizers


Classroom Presenter

– Developed at University of Washington

– goal of the classroom presenter project has been to support the integration of student devices with the instructional materials

– students use tablet pcs and contribute work for the instructor to use in classwide discussion

– bigger impact in the classroom than anticipated, and the ability for the students to use digital ink on the Tablet PC greatly expands what is possible

– Runs under MS Conference XP


Physics Illustrator (MIT)


3D Journal (Cornell)


Adaptive Book


User Reaction to Hardware

• Many tablets do not have optical drives (weight/convenience)

• Users able to use pen; most choose to use keyboard

• Many users find digital ink somewhat inconvenient

• Battery life in some models needs improvement


Tablet PC Software

• Runs all Windows XP software

• Lack of specialized applications causes users to use tablet as if it were a laptop

• True potential for software unknown, software must be domain specific

• Building specialized applications requires flexible recognizer


Microsoft Recognizer

• Microsoft implemented recognizer, works great for numbers, letters


General Recognizer

• Ability to dynamically recognize sketches on the tablet pc is a difficult problem

• One of the approaches to the problem is using Discrete Fourier Transforms


Recognizer Application

Points

DFT

BayesianAlgorithm

An example application which would take user input as a sketchof a data structures, such as a linked list, and generate code

Application Recognizer

Recognizer Output

CustomizablePanel

DB


Lessons Learned from Pilots• Despite all the advantages of tablet PC, still a long

way to go- hardware and software improvements• Students like the device, but don’t (yet) see the need

to spend extra $400-$500 for a tablet PC• Students love the portability and wireless access• Better battery life (at least 8 hrs) and power saving

options (apple)• Great teaching tool – annotate and archive lectures –

go back to them anytime


Tablet Stories/Resources

• http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1785656,00.asp?kc=ewnws041405dtx1k0

• http://research.microsoft.com/ur/us/fundingopps/tablet-curr-rfp-2004_awards.aspx

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1785656,00.asp?kc=ewnws041405dtx1k0

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1785656,00.asp?kc=ewnws041405dtx1k0

http://research.microsoft.com/ur/us/fundingopps/tablet-curr-rfp-2004_awards.aspx

http://research.microsoft.com/ur/us/fundingopps/tablet-curr-rfp-2004_awards.aspx

merrimack college 05/18/05 the role of tablet pc in education ananda gunawardena associate teaching...

Documents

merrimack college

role of tablet pc

tablet pc platform

tablet pc hardware hp

price of tablet pcs

computing education

use of digital ink

motion computing