Teaching with Tablet PC\'s » Andrew French

Movie about How I teach with tablet PC’s

Andrew French — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 02:21:18 +0000

Dyknow 5.2 is a great improvement!

Andrew French — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:21:41 +0000

Faculty have uploaded 5.2 and the crashing problem we encountered last year is gone. Students in class are having fewer crashing problems (1 person twice). I am getting more comfortable using added features, and the new version works really well with PowerPoint files. the slide animations in PowerPoint are preserved in the DyKnow presentation, so I can do the “controlled release of information within a slide content, exactly like PowerPoint.

Semester 3 with Dyknow and tablets

Andrew French — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:33:20 +0000

Well, we are starting our second year, and now that we have an encrypted wireless network we are having far fewer problems with access to the servers. We have 26 tablets in the hands of students and the archive on our Moodle site is working well. I still am having trouble with voice capture, with the bluetooth. . . but in comparison to year one, it is a dream.
Analytical Physics (PHYS 167) and a couple of labs in physics are also using tablets this year, Aaron Miller in 167 has a full class of 26, all with tablets.

Oh, and the local paper (Jackson Citizen-Patriot) ran a story on my class in today’s paper!! (See link below)

Some recognition for tablet teaching at Albion

Andrew French — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 12:26:18 +0000

http://www.mlive.com/news/jackson/index.ssf/2009/08/new_tablet_technology_appealin.html

Why does it seem that I am always complaining on my blog?

Andrew French — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:11:59 +0000

Well, this evening the extended desktop feature crashed on my tablet, it even told me it stopped working that it was going to try to find a solution. . . Did it find one? No. So that meant what I was projecting was my desktop, which meant when I tried to invert the screen to be in tablet mode to write notes for lecture, what was projected was upside down!! Which meant that if I inverted my computer so that screen one was right side up, when I went to screen two, it was upside down! ARRGGHH!!
Reliability, seems to be the key to success with this technology and I do not know why my vista computer keeps forgetting my presets, and that there are three different places you have to check because the HP Presentation button does not completely talk to the Vista Control panel for desktops. Coming up on the end of the second semester and I am still frustrated by these things!! Yes, this semester we have had only two crashes from students verses 8 last semester, and I have had difficulty only three times out of 35 lectures, but you know what? Chalk is reliable 100% of the time and if students and faculty cannot rely on having everything work every single time. . . .

Today April 6

Andrew French — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 14:49:52 +0000

Dog days of Orgo:
Well this morning it was clear that it sometimes does not matter what or how you teach, if the collective attitude of the class is that they don’t want to engage, they won’t. Students this morning clearly were NOT prepared, they “read”, they said, but they were NOT interested in being engaged. They wanted me to stand in front and lecture. Most frustrating.
I used group control for the first time which seemed okay, I wonder if the students just were so burned out by last weeks exam that they are trying to catch up on other classes or just wanted to rest from chemistry.

American Chemical Society Meeting

Andrew French — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 05:18:49 +0000

Well, our American Chemical Society meeting went without a hitch. We are still here in Salt Lake City, but my poster on Sunday Evenign got some good comments and I met with folks who were interested in our assessment plan. They were interested in how were were measuring student attitudes and correlated to student competance. A picture of the poster is below.

I also went to some talks and and have been invited to participate in invesitgating Student preconceptions abotu organic chemsitry. A Chem Ed. PhD. candicdate reported on a pilot of this project and was interested in subjects, and since I have asked a few questions about student perceptions, I felt it would be a good fit.

NITLE Meeting

Andrew French — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 14:36:41 +0000

Just am finishing up a fantastic meeting at DePauw about the use of Tablet PCs and inking technology in classrooms. I have learned all about using inking in PowerPoint, using PDF annotator, Using StickyNotes, and capturing audio and embedding in StickyNotes and using it as a presentation method for Chinese Language classes. 13 Colleges attended and we had folks with loads of experience using Ink based technology, and those with no experience but are trying to think about how to to take those first steps into this arena.

Hewlett Packard Proposal

Andrew French — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:40:43 +0000

Here is a copy of our HP Teaching with Technology Grant application.

view Proposal PDF

Semester two implementation

Andrew French — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 00:09:58 +0000

Well, the Second semester with DyKnow has started and we are in week 6!! Sorry for the delay in posting.

So, we pushed a new load to all the tablets with a new .Net file in hopes this would stop the random crashing that plagued us last semester. Well, it worked for about 5 weeks and we experienced two crashes on the same day last week. . . We recaptured the logs and are keeping track of the two computers that crashed DyKnow in mid session.

The semester began with 12 students returning to my class(out of 22) and another 20 from the other sections. Kyle and Guy again did pre-class assessment and reassigned tablets, this time offering those who had tablets last semester to keep them for this semester, and then distributed the remaining according to the same 2×2 matrix they created last fall semester.

Interesting anecdote; Three students who were given tablets, performed very well in the first semester of organic in another section of the class, with colleagues not using tablets, have decided to NOT use them. They don’t even get one from the cart.

So I am playing with Camtasia, a screen video capturing software that I used to create a 5 minute movie of a short DyKnow sesssion I did in the Airplane on the eay here to San Diego.

More later!! I am going to bed!!