Tablet PC (Pretty Cool)
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008Contributed by Linda Elman, Associate Professor of Modern Languages
Tablet PC technology has proven very effective in all of my Spanish classes. For the literature seminar, I am able to annotate pdfs of critical articles and post the annotated version to Moodle for my students to peruse. In the intermediate grammar course, I can project a document saved in pdf format and annotate it (called “inking”) in various colors, including highlighted text. Compare this Tablet technology to using a transparency with four different color markers (that often stain your fingers), a wet paper towel for erasing your marks, and no ability to highlight important points. Instead, with the Tablet PC, one stylus “inks” and erases with just a click on the tool bar required to change colors, line width or highlighter tools. A final feature, perhaps the best, is that when class ends, you can save the annotated document to a file to use again and, more importantly, to upload to Moodle or email to the students for their review and file.
In this article, I will share a sample of a document for Spanish 330, a conversation and phonetics course. To teach phonetic transcription, I previously relied upon sheets of transparencies (which I had to bold and enlarge in order to make them visible to the class) plus the aforementioned arsenal of transparency markers. As we all know, the overhead projector has its limitations: glare, heat and, inevitably, the times when your hand or body blocks the projected image from view. Alternately, I could write the sentences on the white board at the start of class (time-consuming), then use wet erase markers to write the phonetic symbols. The big disadvantage to this instructional strategy, is that at the end of the class period, all the valuable transcriptions are erased. Again, with the Tablet you can save all your work, then, recycle it for the following class session or exam review.
Here is the sample for your reference. I might add that it is appreciably simpler to write these phrases out by hand, rather than typing with symbols (some not available) and changing colors of text. You can focus on one sound-symbol across all sentences or follow a sequence of steps within one sentence. Prior to my final exam, I plan to prepare a sequence of these pdfs to upload into a power point presentation for our review.