Tablet PC Initiative

2006

Effectiveness of Tablet PCs in Teaching & Learning Using AB/C-IThttp://www2.gcc.edu/abcit

Grove City College & Carnegie Mellon UniversityV. DiStasi, A. Gunawardena, W. Birmingham, G. Welton, D. Ayers

Tablet PCs are expected to significantly increase the effectiveness of technology in the classroom. The promise of the Tablet PC is allowing students to interact with the computer using multiple input modalities such as ink, text, audio and gestures. Each of these modalities brings a unique advantage compared to laptops. However, no significant study has been performed to date which measures the Tablet PCs effectiveness in both teaching and learning with a significant number of faculty and students. Although anecdotal data suggest that positive learning outcomes are possible as a result of using Tablet PCs, rigorous data collection and analysis need to be performed to demonstrate this.

The proposed project will measure the effectiveness of Tablet PCs in education at an institution with a mandatory Tablet PC program, deploying approximately 670 Tablet PCs to every incoming freshman class. We will employ specific pedagogical approaches exploiting the advantages of both the Tablet PC hardware and Tablet PC based software.

We propose to use two complementary adaptive technologies: Adaptive Book (AB) by Textcentric™ for Pre-Lecture Preparation and Post-Lecture Analysis and a Collaborative-Immersive Technology (C-IT), such as DyKnow Vision, Classroom Presenter, or Conference XP for activities that are designed for effective delivery and interaction of content in the classroom.

Figure 1. Student view of DyKnow Vision showing the student’s ability to annotate the material presented by the instructor. A separate application, DyKnow Monitor, allows the instructor to monitor student progress and keep them on task.

Figure 2. Adaptive Book is a smart, thin client utilizing client-server architecture, drawing content from the Adaptive Content Repository (ACR) and allows users to create, label, organize, archive, search and share markups. A markup is a semantically linked collection of highlights, sticky notes (text and ink-based) and links between pages. Markups can be created for various concepts and classified as private, group or public. Public markups are accessible by everyone, while group markups are accessible by all members of a group and private markups only by the owner.

Figure 3. Grove City College Tablet PC program. The program is mandatory for all full-time students. Tablets PCs are distributed to all freshman and transfer students upon their arrival at the College. They are used extensively in and out of the classroom.

Typically, the use of classroom technology is centered on projecting PowerPoint or OneNote materials as part of the lecture. This projection, although providing some advantage over the traditional chalkboard or overhead projectors, is not a significant pedagogical change from historic practices. Rather, a genuine change will be a technologically interactive classroom where professors and students share their computations, analyses, notes, and observations. The immediate feedback is a fundamentally different approach to teaching and learning as it enables the professor to make adjustments, refine the speed and delivery of content, and assess students electronically during a class period.