The Impact of Tablet PCs and Pen-based Technology on Education

A wide variety of disciplines are embracing Tablet PC's and similar pen-based devices as tools for the radical enhancement of teaching and learning. Deployments of Tablet PCs have spanned the K-12, undergraduate, and graduate levels and have dealt with an amazingly diverse range of subject areas including nursing, veterinary science, geology, ethno-musicology, anthropology, landscape architecture, writing, mathematics, computer science, Japanese language, physics, engineering, art, economics, as well as others. Despite the diversity of content areas, many deployments have been similar in terms of the passion they have generated among students and teachers. This work, stemming from the Second Workshop on the Impact of Pen-based Technology on Education (WIPTE) is aimed at identifying best practices in the educational use of pen-based computing so that all educators may benefit from this next generation of technology.