As I sit here doing my trip reports from my most recent events I figured I should share some of the excitement I have seen. Heck, perhaps this can be my trip report…

I attended Educause 2004 in Denver and CIT in Tampa a few weeks back. Both were events focused on education. Educause was packed with IT Pro’s that service universities as well as some key BDM. CIT was more community college focused and the attendance seemed to be a good mix of educators, faculty and IT people.

At both events we had people lined up at our booth to try out the Tablet PC and see what was new.  What I realized is just like you and I these folks are completely swamped with their work and rarely get a chance to surface up and see what’s happening.  We had people telling us how the trip was worthwhile because of our demonstrations and what they learned about Tablet PC!

So here’s what we demonstrated and tried to communicate

What’s unique about Tablets?

-        Being able to take notes in Ink

-        A very natural way to annotate documents

-        Runs all your existing software

-        You can use it standing up

Our demo’s took about 8 minutes and consisted of

-        OneNote showing Ink based note taking and text searching of the ink, we also showed off the collaborative experience built into OneNote (thanks Tony)

-        Notepad (yes notepad.exe) to show how any Windows app runs well with Tablet thanks to the TIP. We also demonstrated the TIP’s real-time recognition capability, context tagging and the correction experience.

-        MathJournal from XThink - starting from 2+2 up to tables to simultaneous equations. It was one of several jaw dropping experiences. BTW, check out XThink’s Holiday Pricing J

-        GoBinder from Agilix – Simply pen perfect! We walked through calendars, managing research projects, class curriculum, homework assignments and all.

-        Physics Illustrator, one of our power toys and a pleasure to demonstrate but it was hard to get the machines back from the attendees. The key takeaway was how Tablet PC could be used to augment their curriculum with easy to do simulations that can help re-enforce the basic concepts.

By this time the crowd typically grew larger and they were all asking for more. We pointed them to the Tegrity Booth to see their campus and note taking tools, we also pointed out DyKnow and their product line. We also showed tabletpcpost and discussed some of Loren’s products from JumpingMinds, Fraction Practice was a hit, The Music Composition tool from Brown University and the NY Times Crossword Puzzle power toy. (most teachers thought the use of colors to indicate correct or wrong letters made it too easy)

It was fun, the excitement in their eyes was amazing. I could barely talk after two days but it’s worth it when you know you made an impact. I know there are plenty other great apps for this space, so let me know what I missed and I’ll add them to my repertoire.

/frank

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights! It’s just my personal humble opinion.