My On-Again, Off-Again Relationship with my Tablet

Peter's post, I still like the tablet. But I am all out of love. , got me to thinking: Why do I use a Tablet PC? I've posted before about how Peter got me interested in them way back when, last Spring, when he got his first tablet, the first generation of the HP, the one that I currently have. It took me a while to really "get" or understand why Tablets had such a following. Now I know that many people will debate how many people actually have a tablet. And they'll debate whether or not the adoption rate can be considered "promising" or "successful". Numbers and money aside, I feel that those who have their Tablet, are for the most part, happy with their purchase.

In the spring, I used my Tablet primarily for two purposes, work and personal. For work, I used it in the daily business of teaching. I wrote my lesson plans in OneNote, took attendance through the schools in-house system...which I'll admit was a pain because it was definitely not set up for inking, and kept track of my students' grades using Grade Machine, another app that has no inking interface. I also used it to download articles that I wanted to read from various news sites, or read blogs that I subscribed to with News Gator during my lunch breaks. Oh, and using Art Rage, I colored during faculty meetings, while still managing to maintain the "I'm truely busy and taking notes" persona.

There were a lot of other things I wanted to do at work with my tablet. However, I was limited mainly by my lack of initiative. I wanted to set up a wireless network in my classroom, which was a lab of 25 Dell computers, and using a software called Altiris Vision, control the screens of all the computers from my Tablet as I walked around the room. There would have been a lot of obvious benefits to this idea. The Vision software allows the master user to transmit his or her screen image to all of the other computers, i.e. a teacher could take notes, and zap them to all the other computers. I already did this with a main computer in the lab. However, I thought with a tablet, I could also use my inking capabilities, which before, of course, I didn't have access too. It's much easier to draw a T-Account model with my tablet pen, instead of going into Microsoft Word and using the Drawing tool bar, and mouse clicking one. Also, by using a tablet on a wireless network, I could do all of this, and check to see if the little buggers were in fact taking notes, or sleeping, or painting their nails, or doing any of thousands of things high school students do when they don't want to do what you want them to do.

So I said that I was limited by my lack of initiative. That's true. Peter offered to give me a access point, so I could set up a wireless network. I'm not sure why I didn't do that, to be honest, I think it was because of the hassle. It really wouldn't been that big of deal to set-up, but, like my Poppop used to say "If it ain't broke, why fix it?". I could effectively teach just fine, without using my tablet in the way I mentioned above. I only had 3 months left in the school year, so I didn't. All of my students passed for the year, and I'd say about 90% of them truely had a handle on most of the material...Then why do I feel so guilty? Hmm.. That's for another post.

For personal use, I use my tablet at home mainly to surf the net...I also occasionally do homework, or make up groccery lists in OneNote. That's when I use my tablet at home. Lately, I've been using my Powerbook instead. I know, the horrors! Here's why: my Powerbook is a nice, all-contained little machine. It has a CDR/DVDR drive, lots and lots of ports, a decent sized screen at 12 inches, and although it gets hot as anything on the bottom when it is charging, it is still my easier to balance on my lap on the couch versus my HP.

I also have a lot of things set up for ease of use on my Powerbook. For example, I use my iPod pretty much daiily, with my trips to the gym being 6 days a week or so as of late. I hook it up to my Powerbook and sync/charge it, while I download iTunes songs...ok, while I download the one free song Apple has been providing per week..heehee. I also use my dot Mac account. I upload pictures from iPhoto and put together photo albums for our friends and family to see. So I haven't been very loyal to my tablet at home lately...although I am composing this on it. There are a lot of things I still have to learn about my Tablet and I am going to make myself use it more...maybe I will even put iTunes on it and sent my iPod to sync with it...Oh no! Peter would have a heart attack if I did that, I always swore I never would...I said "maybe" after all.