Students replace books with Tablet PCs
When Chao Long started eighth grade at The Ellis School last year, her mother, Chaohua Yan, immediately noticed a change.
"Your bookbag is so much lighter," her daughter recalls her saying. "Is eighth grade easier?"
Carnegie Mellon University is conducting an experiment at The Ellis School and one of CMU's own classes in which traditional textbooks are replaced with a Tablet personal computer. The HP Compaq 1100 Tablet PCs weigh 4 pounds and have been adapted so students can highlight key passages on the screen and write on the e-text with a digital pen. Students also can send their homework on the Tablet PCs and get material from their teachers.
"I can understand the material better because I have a visual image. It's a lot easier and faster to type. It's all on one file," said Chao, 14, of Squirrel Hill.
Experts in educational technology say the public has been slow to accept computerized textbooks, called e-texts.
"Nationally, students have not warmed up to e-texts at first because they saw little advantage in them," said Diana Oblinger, vice president of EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit group in Boulder, Colo., interested in technology in higher education. She said the print on the screen used to be harder to read than regular texts, and the software lacked features to encourage people to use it.
That is beginning to change as new software lets students do more things than they could do with a textbook.
Nine eighth-graders at Ellis have replaced their hardback geometry and earth science texts with Tablet PCs. The geometry class uses software developed by Shadyside-based TextCENTRIC that allows students to highlight passages and trade material with their teacher.
Math teacher Russ Schopper presents a problem on a computerized blackboard. The same image appears on the students' 8-by-10-by-1-inch computers. A split screen lets the students solve the problem on one side and refer to the textbook on the other.
Ellis students complain of long startup times for the PC and the danger of computer crashes, but the benefits, they say, outweigh the disadvantages.
Before this experiment, Chao said her 6-year-old brother Bobby could not even lift her bookbag, which often contained four textbooks and three binders. The bookbag of her classmate Heather Acuff, 14, of McCandless, was so heavy that she used to roll it around on wheels.
Ananda Gunawardena, an associate professor of computer science at CMU, has a $100,000 grant from California-based Hewlett-Packard to study how students interact with its Tablet PCs and how well they learn.
Besides its lightness, Gunawardena said, another popular feature is the search engine, which works like Google. Students type in some key words, and the search engine finds a particular passage faster than they could from the index of a hardback.
He teaches a class to 25 students who use Tablet PCs. A few of them complained that it is hard to read on the small screen and that because of copyright restrictions, they cannot print out material from the e-text. As a result, students have to cut and paste material, then print it out.
Cara Palermo, 19, a freshman from Linwood, N.J., prefers taking notes on the Tablet PC for her computer science class.
"It's definitely better this way, especially this class," she said. "It's much easier to have it in one place."
