Here’s a picture of the Tablet PC LE1600

I like using MS Office’s OneNote to write, store, and organize my notes in class.

Here’s a screen shot of the program.

You can probably just barely see the colored tabs across the top that say Algebra II, Pre-Algebra, Algebra I, Geometry, 5th Algebra I, Bus. Math, and Adv. Math, but those are the tabs for the class notes for each of those classes.  Then along the right-hand side of the screen, you probably can’t see what the tabs say, but they say, Assignments, Lesson 75, lesson 76, lesson 77, etc: these are the tabs that lead to the assignment sheet and the notes for those lessons.  This is the way I used to organize my notes in school (except that there were pages I tore out to turn in to the instructor or professor).

Here’s a picture taken from right near where I usually stand in my classroom which includes the tablet in the lower right corner and the screen at the front of the room.

I  really like this program MS OneNote and how it simulates a notebook, but saves everything in an organized fashion that I’ve written and allows me to display it all for the students to see, and print anything out for them as well.  If a student is absent, I can just print out the day’s notes and the assignment sheet for him, or her, by hitting print and the notes go to my personal, 21 PPM Network Printer (HP 4100), which duplexes, at the back of the room (which I bought four years ago for $500).

Of course, what makes this all possible is that we now have digital projectors in each class and brand new 5’x7′ screens to project onto.  If you’re a teacher, and don’t have a projector yet, start squeaking and get one of these projectors.  It’s much better than using the overhead projector or the whiteboard.  I’m storing my old overhead projector in the brown closet in the corner, incase some of this hi-tech stuff goes down.

I just called Motion Computing and told them my serial number (by going into the bios) and they said they’d send me the recovery CDs right away by next day air.  They haven’t arrived yet, but I am very impressed with their customer service department.  I don’t need them at this point, but may need them at some point in the future.

My LE1600 has a 30gig HD and 1.5GB of ram.  I just upgraded the memory from 512MB and am going to start searching for a hard drive imaging program that will allow me to image the 30GB HD over to a 60 or 100 GB HD.

I’m going to be getting OneNote 2007 in the mail any day, and then I’m going to start actively looking for a way to transfer these notes to a shared spot online using Microsoft’s SharePoint server software (I think that’s the name) then the students in the classes can access the day’s notes and the assignment from the Internet.