I've been doing quite a lot of work in preparation for our annual Readers' Choice Top 100 issue that comes out in January, and some of our reader feedback has emphasized the usefulness of tablet PC's, which are touchscreen laptops that enable handwritten notes when you swivel the screen around and hold it like a notebook. Student use is the ideal for this type of technology, which you might have read in my November cover story about touchscreens, as a lot of students can't type too well or too fast, and are much more comfortable writing notes by hand.
The Lenovo ThinkPad X61 is a great example, it has received rave reviews for its versatility and computing power. The Forest Ridge School of The Sacred Heart, a small all-girls school in Bellevue, Washington, announced today that they just bought 330 for their entire student body. Administrators there claim these tablets provide "sturdy yet lightweight
technology with easy-to-use features, along with multimedia and
touchscreen capabilities that make computing simple for students."
Granted, the economy is making such forward-thinking, pricey implementations impossible for most public school districts at the moment, but I think this is a good indication of the future of one-to-one initiatives: tablet PC's, not just plain ol' vanilla laptops, make the most sense and will probably be what are commonly used.
IBM has produced a truly stunning notebook computer made up of the best mobile components available. Yes it’s ludicrously expensive, but that doesn’t stop it being a superb mobile workstation, and definitely doesn’t stop me wanting one.
Posted by: cheap computers | June 11, 2009 at 07:01 AM