One of the other pre-conference conversations last night was about the Tablet PC. One of the schools here got a grant to put Tablets into 20 teachers’ hands and the result has been, not surprisingly, very favorable. The responses sounded a lot like those of the teachers at my school who have talked about how the new classroom model has changed not only the way they teach but the way they feel about teaching. Very cool.
One thing I’ve started to do more and more with my tablet is to take interesting blog posts or articles found on the Web, “print” them into OneNote, the most awesome notebook program for the Tablet, and then mark them up as I read with the pen. In doing so, I’m creating a whole searchable library of interesting content, I’m also creating a whole searchable library of my handwritten notes. So now what I can do is not only add tags to a certain article, I can tag pieces of an article for retreival later. (See this example snippet of David Warlick’s latest post…I simply add the number 1 at the end of the tag to separate if from words in the text.) That is very, very cool, I think, and something that I wish I could do on the Web in general. Imagine if you could pick out half a dozen sections out of one piece of content and tag each one individually. That would really separate out relevant content and make synthesis of it all later so much easier.
The problem is that I feel like I’m doing double duty now, creating my own library in OneNote, yet still saving bookmarks in del.icio.us. I’m finding the former more powerful, but the latter more social, obviously. Not going to stop sharing, but I have to say the difference between the two is pretty striking.
