Beth Adamczyk's Page

Wednesday's good for me, Beth, so let's set it. I'm free from 11:00-12:30 that day. I was going to ask you the same question about conferencing... I'm a complete novice on that topic, never had an occasion to use any before! I'll check out Yugma, and also ask my IT director if she recommends anything.

Jim

All good questions, Beth, and I'll try to answer them briefly for you, but of course it'll be better to talk in real time. My school does a rotating schedule, so I frequently have days when I'm free between 11:30-12:30. One such day is this Friday... if you want we can try for that one.

There are a lot of ways you could use the shared notebooks depending on how you prefer to run your class, but I'll run you briefly through my setup. Your tech people need to set up a shared folder on a server somewhere for your teachers and students to access. I create a new shared notebook for each unit (Chapter 3, Ch. 5, etc.), and have separate places on it for notes, for individual students' classwork, etc.) Students can see what one another do, which is one of the nice enhancements it offers ("how did Susie do that one?"), but it's true they have to be careful about erasing one another's work (or yours). It happens sometime, but I keep a separate notebook of my own for planning purposes which is essentially a blank template for the unit, so if something accidentally gets lost I can always copy/paste it back in.

I do use a regular textbook, but I make much more use of the accompanying resource files (in pdf form) than the actual paper copy. I usually screen-clip then paste individual or groups of problems I want the kids to work on - do you have the MS Snipping Tool installed?

My kids take tests & quizzes in OneNote, too. Each student creates a separate "Assessments" notebook, which is NOT shared, and where they take them & store them after corrections & grades. They email the tests to me, I correct them and email them back.

There's lots of other ways to make it work, too - you can password-protect individual sections, e.g.

Let me know about Friday, and if not, I'll take a look at next week's schedule and see wht I have available. I'm heading into spring break the week of March 15th, so I'll have 2 weeks of a pretty open schedule at that point too.

Best,
jim

Beth, I'd be happy to. From what you're describing, I'd guess there are a few quick adjustments your teachers could make that would instantly leave them feeling at least less frustrated and more favorably disposed to tablets... let me know what kind of time frame you're looking for.

I would suggest that you start a new discussion topic for that in that group, and then use the "Send Message to Group" feature to tell people that the discussion topic is there. You should probably include the URL of that discussion page so that people can easily click into it. You might also consider sending an email to the ISED-L list-serv that asks the same question and included the link back to the Tablet PC discussion page. Hope that helps!
Demetri

ps. I evaluated a ton of cases and ultimately decided that the InfoCase Classmate TL-12 was the best case. If you start a discussion I'll add my comments on it there. :)