I am an evangelist at heart and I say “this is cool” often but this really is cool. We all know what the Tablet PC can do in education they are simply phenomenal from note taking, to annotations, to managing tons of research material in an electronic pen enabled format. 

BackPack.net is a collaborative effort between the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore  and Microsoft Singapore with the goal of enhancing the learning experience through technology in education. This five-year initiative is designed to facilitate the research, development, testing and showcasing of new technologies in the learning environment. BackPack.NET encourages student-centric learning through the use of Tablet PCs, digital inking and other innovative technologies.

This is the type of initiative that will continue to grow, we have an opportunity here to work together in this space to really change the world. There are many Tablet centric ISV’s in the education, I’ve blogged about this before, why not get together and figure out how to build an initiative supporting this type of effort?

I met with an MS Development manager yesterday, his name is Yun Seong and he’s one of the people responsible for this effort. I think I impressed him with the ISV applications I know of and he certainly impressed me with the ones he knew of. The interesting take-away was we need to work better together to nurture this progress.

Any of you who are parents realize the value of education and the possibilities of how technology can augment curriculum. I, like most of you, want my kids to be able to calculate sales tax in their heads but I also want them to have tools and technologies that can enable them to reach their full potential.

Let me know if you’re interested in collaborating in this space and perhaps we can work together on building out some type orchestrated effort to combine forces and change the education landscape forever…

Send me email to “tabisv@microsoft.com” with a heading of “Tablets in Education” and depending on the feedback I’ll see what we can do to take this to the next level…

/frank

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