Beyond the Blackboard

Resources and tools give educators and students a high tech edge (from 2004)

USB pen drives | Small but mighty

Over the last several years, Universal Serial Bus (USB ) pen drives have slowly increased in popularity as their capacity and speed rise, and their price decreases. With almost every new computer sold on the market today supporting USB devices, and the USB standard so well-established, compatibility is hardly a concern. Even though they are small enough to hang from a key chain, a significant amount of information can be carried around.

In addition to being portable, USB pen drives are relatively inexpensive. In June 2004, for example, a 1GB USB pen drive could be purchased for about $250. Higher capacity drives, such as 2GB and 4GB versions, are also quickly becoming available. Compared to a laptop, USB drives are more durable and easier to manage.

How is this important?
In terms of access speed, pen drives sit somewhere between a CD and a hard drive. This means they can’t be used exactly like a hard drive, but there are still a lot of options. Usage can generally be separated into three groups: data management, software management and operating system portability.

The most well-know application of USB pen drives is as a tool for storing simple data such as course material, homework, reference material, research material and presentations.

A system administrator can use pen drives to install applications, drivers and other tools on computers that are disconnected or disabled. Students can use pen drives to contain fully functional applications that can be run directly from the device such as web browsers, games or software development tools.

Many of the USB pen drives can also be made bootable; that is, they can store a fully functional operating system. From the PC’s perspective, a bootable pen drive looks exactly like any other hard drive. The benefit for system administrators is as a powerful tool for diagnosing and correcting problems with damaged systems. Install an operating system containing several different diagnostic tools onto the pen drive, for example, and use it to start up a disabled system to find out what’s wrong with it. In situations where the hardware is predictable (such as a classroom), several operating systems have been adapted to function smoothly from pen drives. Various forms of Linux and BSD exist that are ideal for this type of application.

References
USB 2.0 Hi-speed Flash drive review, ARS Technica (http://arstechnica.com/reviews/004/flash/flash-1.html).
KNOPPIX is a bootable CD with a collection of GNU/Linux software, automatic hardware detection and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices and other peripherals (http://www.knoppix.org).
Feather Linux is a Linux distribution that runs completely off a CD or a USB pen drive and takes up less than 64 megabytes of space. It tries to include software that most people would use every day (http://featherlinux.berlios.de).

Tablet PCs | Ready to go

In 2002, several manufacturers started offering a new generation of portable computing device called the tablet PC. This portable device runs a specialized version of the Microsoft Windows XP Professional operating system, and borrows heavily on concepts established in both laptops and handheld PCs.

Laptops and handhelds have both established themselves as valuable tools used in many of today’s applications. Handhelds are designed with portability in mind: small and light, fitting comfortably in the palm of your hand, consuming little power and featuring either a stylus (pen) or a miniature keyboard. Laptops, on the other hand, provide as much speed and power as a typical desktop computer, but in a format and size that make them portable enough to easily transport from one location to another.

A tablet PC is built with the following ideals in mind:
> Tablet pen and ink: Much like many handhelds, the entire display becomes a writing surface, allowing users to write in text or draw directly into a document. The pen-and-ink metaphor also lends itself well to the graphical characteristics of many Asian languages.
> Speech capabilities: Tablet PC users can interact vocally with the device, allowing them to annotate documents, dictate text or even issue voice commands.
> Mobility: Tablet PCs are about the size and weight of a textbook, making them much more comfortable to carry around than most laptops. They require less power than the typical laptop, allowing batteries to last longer between charges. Many tablet PCs also offer the freedom of built-in wireless networking.

Tablet PCs come in two types: convertible and slate. Convertible tablet PCs include a keyboard that either flips or slips away, allowing them to be used as either a laptop or slate-style device. Slate tablet PCs are a stylus-only device and do not include a keyboard, making them smaller and lighter.

How is this important?
Tablet PCs give students something most laptops cannot: the ability to take notes in almost all classes. Students can draw complex diagrams in science class, record equations in math class or take text notes in any class — all with the same tool and all stored digitally. With the tablet’s emphasis on portability and connectivity, sharing those notes is as easy as dragging them into an e-mail and sending them off.

In terms of design, the tablet PC’s unique slate display (taller than it is wider) is similar to most books and periodicals and is therefore a much more natural way of reading text.

Once class is done, students can throw their tablet PC into a knapsack and pull it out later to use almost instantly.

Canada’s largest known educational investment in tablet PCs will occur when Bishop’s College School in Lennoxville, Quebec gives the 300 Toshiba tablet PCs it has purchased to its students and teachers. It is the only instance where an entire school is moving to tablet PC-based instruction and learning.

Suggested reading
Tablet PC: Transforming education, Microsoft .

References
Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition: An Overview (Nov. 15, 2002), Microsoft Support WebCast
“New tablet PCs to pad the market” (October 13, 2003).

Digital reference material | Going with ones and zeros

North American post-secondary institutions have embraced the idea of the digital classroom. Because of this push, publishing companies are offering a significant amount of digital material to these educators. The same is not true, however, for K to 12 educators; most don’t have the same level of resources and are unable to make the same type of commitment to their students.

Much of the learning material Canadian schools use comes from a handful of textbook publishers and, as a result, the actual market for creating electronic textbooks for many courses is not there. In addition, existing textbooks are often collaborative works, with input from multiple authors and numerous artists and photographers. Obtaining permission to convert and republish books digitally is a potential logistical nightmare.

Despite these challenges, textbook publishers recognize the value of the digital medium as an effective learning tool. Publishers such as McGraw-Hill, Thompson and Pearson all have a small library of digital books and often provide digital enhancements to many of their printed textbooks in the form of interactive media and online references.

How is this important?
Many independent schools are committed to the idea of the digital classroom. The benefits of digital text include portability, a reduction in the number of textbooks students must carry around, flexible content presentation, and the fact that it can be viewed and navigated in a variety of ways.

With time, digital textbooks will become more available. In fact, the latest generations of IBM ThinkPad educational laptops optionally come with a collection of digital reference materials and research tools produced by Vital Source Technologies.

Some schools have approached textbook publishers directly, seeking permission for the schools to digitize portions of already-purchased materials themselves.

While schools and publishers sort out the legalities and logistics, much of the material used for courses such as computer science and languages is available licence-free on the Internet. Examples include initiatives such as the digital archive found at the Oxford Text Archive (http://www.ota.ahds.ac.uk) or the resurrected text found at Project Gutenberg (http://www.promo.net/pg).

References
CAST is a not-for-profit education research and development organization that uses technology to make education more flexible and accessible for all students, especially those with disabilities.

Thompson Learning E-Catalogue delivers tailored learning solutions for individuals, businesses and institutions (http://e-catalog.thomsonlearning.com/150l).

VitalSource Technologies, The vitalsource KEY pulls together materials from respected publishers and helps schools integrate that information into their teaching environments.

Pearson Prentice Hall, an American educational secondary publisher of scientifically researched and standards-based instruction materials for Grades 6 to 12.

Online education tools & resources | Free for all

For the education community, much of the Internet’s value lies in its power as a research, learning and communications tool. Members of this vast community not only draw on the Internet as a reference, but often contribute to it as well.
At an institutional level, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s recently launched OpenCourseWare (OCW) program illustrates how large bodies can contribute to the online community on a big scale. The program is an initiative in which MIT is publishing much of the course material and making it freely available online.

Educators can also participate through online research journals. Much like their traditional format, online journals are peer-reviewed articles based on specific topics. Journals can be a discussion of almost any subject, such as distance education, technology or languages. Online journals are often archived and can be seen by anyone with Internet access and a desire to learn.

As well, several well-established commercial products are designed to provide highly specialized, educationally oriented forums for schools, teachers and students to collaborate. Products offered from companies such as Blackboard, WebCT and Open Text all offer products that provide educators with ability to share information.

At a much less formal level, individual educators can reach their audience by publishing online web logs (blogs). Blogs are usually published on private websites and feature a collection of personal entries made by the author over an extended period. The casual format of a blog allows individuals to publish almost anything. Blogs can contain valuable information resources or act as an outlet for personal thoughts, feelings or even frustrations.

How is this important?
With the reduction in resources and budgets, schools must come up with creative ways of raising money. The unfortunate side-effect of this has been that knowledge is often thought of as a commodity offered only by educational institutions. Initiatives such as MIT’s OCW and the increased popularity of online research journals and blogs show that many educators recognize knowledge is a right to be shared, not a product or the exclusive domain of educational organizations.

Suggested reading
“Blogs help educators share ideas, air frustrations” (January14,2004), by Mark Toner, Education Week (http://www.edweek.org/ew/ewstory.cfm?slug=18Blogs.h23&keywords=blogs).
“Online research journals taking off” (December10, 2003) by Debra Viadero, Education Week
Open Access Journals in the Field of Education, American Educational Research Association Special Interest Group (http://aera-cr.asu.edu/ejournals/index.html).
Publications of the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE) (http://www.aace.org/pubs/default.html), and the AACE Digital Library (http://www.aace.org/dl/).