Tablet PC

Posted Fri Aug 27, 2004 in

I’ve been trying, over the last few years, to eliminate the amount of paper that I handle. I’ve moved my class handouts, homework problems and assignments, over to PDF format that I distribute on my website. The students, of course, still work their assignments on paper and turn them in. (Or, they work them in the computer, print them, and turn them in.)

My notes, however, are still in notebooks, handwritten. They are hard to revise because of the paper.

I’ve been tempted to typeset them, using LaTeX, but that is a lot of work. I want to get them in digital format, though, because that makes editing a lot easier.

During the faculty meeting yesterday, the system administrator for our department was taking note on a tablet computer. I watched him, and after the meeting I talked to him about his experience. The software recognizes his handwriting, so I thought it might recognize mine.

After finishing up my report and presentation for next week, Wife and I went over to CompUSA and I looked at a Toshiba Protege tablet PC. I played around with it for about a half-hour, writing on it and checking how it would interpret my writing. It is really pretty good at it.

Despite the fact that it’s a Windows machine, I decided to buy it and use it for taking notes in meetings, where a notebook computer might be hard to set up, and for classwork. Somehow, I’ve lost one of the notebooks that contains my class notes for my surface-water hydrology class, so there is a good chance to try out my idea.

I have a feeling that this is going to work pretty well. I’m looking forward to eliminating paper notes from my archive and using digital notes instead. Maybe then I’ll transition to using some PowerPoint slides in my presentations as well. I’ve been resisting that because, well, that’s another story.