April 2006 — Features
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Tablet PCs: The Write Approach
Move over, laptops. As 1-to-1 computing becomes the goal on K-12 campuses, school districts are turning to this newer, pen-based technology.
MOBILE COMPUTING at Saint Mary’s School, an all-girls school in Raleigh, NC, used to be a consistently
disruptive endeavor. Students would saunter into class, pull out their laptops, flip open the screens,
and settle at their desks behind a wall of technology. Sure, this wall was giving the students the latest and
greatest in technology. But at the same time, it was fencing them off from a connection with their teacher,
a key interaction in the learning process. Performance plummeted. Teachers bristled. Then, finally, last year,
the school discovered a brand-new way of approaching 1-to-1 computing: pen-based tablet PCs.
Within weeks, the school’s new Lenovo ThinkPad X41 tablet PCs had transformed the way Saint Mary’s teachers did their jobs. Teachers created outlines for each class, projected those outlines onto a screen, and used tablet technology to scribble down notes on the file while lecturing. After class, the teachers saved the notes to a Web server for anyone to access. Suddenly, Saint Mary’s 275 female students were getting enthused about technology. Originally, the school planned to refresh the entire laptop program with tablets by 2007. Now, however, Director of Technology Jessica Sepke says she’ll work to replace all the laptops by the end of this coming year— an unprecedented rollout in terms of time to market.
“Our teachers are excited about using [tablets] in the classroom, so we want to roll them out as quickly as possible,” Sepke says of the school’s change in plans. “As a technologist, when you’re dealing with a rush job brought about by overwhelming user satisfaction, believe me when I say it’s the kind of challenge you want to have.”
A CLEAN STATE: The Levono ThinkPad
X41 transformed the
learning process at
Saint Mary’s School in North Carolina.
Saint Mary’s isn’t the only K-12 school district to build its 1-to-1 computing program around tablet technology; over the last few years, a number of other districts have also chosen tablets as the basis of a 1-to-1 initiative. In many cases, this new take on mobile computing serves as a supplement to the old and trusty laptops. In others, particularly those like Saint Mary’s, technologists are relying upon tablet technology to replace laptops altogether, sending the flip-up screen the way of the Dodo bird and the joystick.
