Whheex: I take “UVM” to indicate that you are or will be a student at the University of Vermont. If this is the case, UVM was a participant with Microsoft beginning in 2004 to explore the educational use of Tablet PCs in the classroom. UVM’s Schools of Business and Engineering either highly recommend or require incoming students to have Tablet PCs.
See:
Why a Tablet PC? : Tablet PCs @ UVM : University of Vermont
UVM gives students some reasons why a Tablet PC would help them in their studies:
“A student preparing for his/her exam is reviewing his/her notes. In their OneNote notebook, they see a side note scribbled in the margin labeled ‘Topeka, KA – 1913’. Their recollection does not help them decipher this comment. With the audio indexing capability of OneNote, they can click on that note and can hear what the instructor was saying when this note was taken. If this was a 3 hour lecture, this indexed audio track makes audio records efficient and immediate.
A student doing homework comes across a term he/she remembers hearing in class earlier in the semester. With the full indexing capability of MS OneNote, hand-written notes, audio files and rich content are fully indexed and searchable so searching for the term “diminishing return’s” in their OneNote notebook will find all locations where the term was referenced or mentioned in class or in their handwritten notes.
With the advent of electronic text books, on-line course readings and overall digital management of course correspondences, syllabi and assignments, Tablet PCs enable students to fully entwine the plethora of digital resources associated to the educational experience in the modern classroom with their naturally captured handwritten notes.”
For math majors, Xthink’s Mathjournal program allows you to write out your equations on the Tablet Pc’s screen and then provides you with the solution. To turn in your assignment, the program outputs what you’ve written down and the solution to either the program’s native output format or to LaTex.
As for your coursework, a convertible Tablet PC is just like a regular laptop. If you can type your notes, you can do so easily. If you have to learn chemical compounds, you can either write it down on a piece of paper or write on your Tablet PC and link information off the web to that compound and hear whatever your instructor said about it during a lecture or any lecture during the term (using MS OneNote).
While e-textbooks are still rare, a Tablet PC would allow you to link your notes to your instructor’s audio portion of his/her lecture/lectures with information off the web (articles, pictures, songs, even YouTube videos) and search through your e-textbook for references. Just a click away!
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