In our district we are lucky enough to have an educational Foundation, a group of volunteers, mostly mothers, who organize fundraising activities to help pay for things that the budget won't cover. Every January they invite the teachers and administrators to apply for grants and later in the spring they tell us which ones are approved. We've gotten some wonderful things from these grants -- stuff we never would have otherwise. A climbing wall in the gym. A kiln in the art room. Books in many classrooms. Much of their money goes to technology. This is no surprise. Technology is expensive, desirable, useful everywhere, and obsolete in five years.
The latest cool toy is the tablet PC. They gave us money for nine of them this year, and I was just showing mine off to one of the Foundation Board members this morning. She was quite impressed as I showed her how portable it is and how empowering it is. I expounded on how useful this is in the classroom, since you can walk around the room and look over the kids' shoulders while they work and make notes on their performance. But the thing that really blew her away was the handwriting recognition, because it is so impressively, amazingly good. I can scribble any fool thing and it gets turned into perfect text. And I really do mean scribble. For a teacher I have messy handwriting. (I'm not good at remembering names either.)
So what are we doing with these tablets? I was helping out in a fifth-grade math class earlier today. The teacher there, my friend Joe, uses the tablet to project the do-now assignment, so that the kids can work on it when they walk into the room. "But you can do that with any computer", I hear you say. Yes, but can you do this? He uses Journal to solve math problems, writing them out on the page and showing how to solve them. And the best part of all is that he hands the tablet to students to solve problems for the class. The look on the face of a child who has been handed a tablet and a pen, to write something for the class to see, is the kind of reward that drew most of us into teaching. It's just a pity that even our Foundation can't afford to put one of these into every classroom.