tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-112399742011-07-30T21:58:12.676-05:00This blog is being replaced by Educational Ink, devoted to the same subject but without the affiliation in name with my former employer. All articles posted here will be posted on my new blog. Eventually, this one will disappear...Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.comBlogger381100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-32227355836585535052010-05-28T12:33:00.000-05:002010-05-28T12:33:18.814-05:00

I haven't written much over the past few years. Part of it was just the busy-ness of life: finding a job, moving overseas, working in a foreign culture at a new school that was still establishing itself in every way. But part of it also, was a general and ill-defined discouragement about the stagnant state of the Tablet PC ecosystem. That discouragement still stands, but it is no longer so

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-11655439698024826982008-03-01T06:20:00.000-05:002008-03-01T06:25:18.518-05:00

I lost my job recently and I can't find it anywhere. That's because it no longer exists. Vermont Academy, in response to the financial challenges that increasingly are facing most independent schools, eliminated several positions as a cost-cutting measure. Mine was one of them. Actually, two of them were in the IT department, which I believe bodes ill for the future of the Vermont Academy Tablet

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-91592463913552696912008-02-08T11:52:00.000-05:002008-02-08T12:37:54.327-05:00

There are two upcoming Tablet PC-in-education workshops that I know have had significant impacts on educators who have attended in past years. I believe that both do good work furthering the reach of Tablet PCs in education with sensible realism, not with the breathless hyperbole (from both directions!) that so often accompanies discussions of technology in education.The first is the third annual

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-27824741228455951652007-11-13T17:10:00.000-05:002007-11-13T20:31:12.632-05:00

I just reread a not-so-recent posting on Infoworld.com about the demise of the print edition of that venerable tech magazine. It is a short article, worth the read even for those not into tech specifically. Ed Foster writes about his mixed feelings regarding the cessation of a hard copy edition of the magazine as it moved to a web-only existence.I have to confess that I share his ambivalence

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-6083350050186351402007-11-13T17:00:00.000-05:002007-11-13T20:30:43.064-05:00

So much has been happening over the last year (or two!) that postings here have languished. Certainly not for lack of topic material!We are now officially a one-to-one Tablet PC school. After a major vendor snafu, we are now mostly running on HP 2710p Tablet PCs, which I generally like well. (More on this later.) We are a significantly smaller school than we have been in the past, a somewhat

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-75231892632051955942007-08-15T14:58:00.000-05:002007-08-15T15:12:08.875-05:00

Just a quick note as a follow-up to the last (now ancient) post.InfoWorld has posted an article on the state of online applications as replacements for desktop applications. Can Web-based applications outwit, outplay, outlast the desktop? It is an interesting read and approaches this topic pretty much strictly from the angle of how well the various web-based offerings compare with MS Office in

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1176341832702359032007-04-11T20:25:00.000-05:002007-04-11T20:37:12.716-05:00

Maybe I'm just getting old… There was a time when I would jump all over any new technology with the starry-eyed optimism of any youth, or at least any young geek, thinking that this technology was the wave of the future and anyone who couldn't see that was just ignorant. (Oh wait, that attitude is what gave us the Dot-Com bubble, wasn't it? And the subsequent Dot-Com bust…)But these days, more

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1169065338506622502007-01-17T15:19:00.000-05:002007-01-17T15:22:18.516-05:00

As a starter to what I hope is a renewed period of activity on this blog, I wanted to share my thoughts on the "perfect" Tablet PC. Perfect, at least, within the current bounds of the technology.First a quick update on what we are using at Vermont Academy. (We are just now beginning to look at options for next year, though we won't be making a final decision until March or April.)Our standard

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1169065150916749282007-01-17T15:17:00.000-05:002007-01-17T15:19:10.926-05:00

(Does anyone remember the old Firesign Theatre sketch with that song in it?)After a lengthy hiatus, I am hopeful that I can get back to a more regular schedule posting here. It is certainly not a lack of activity that has kept things so quiet. Quite the contrary.That said, I'll start with a post I've been mulling over for a long time...

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1159843051693144542006-10-02T21:12:00.000-05:002006-10-02T21:37:32.153-05:00

As anyone who works at a boarding school knows, the time around the start of school is always hectic and tiring. Make that exhausting. Then we add Trustees/Alumni Weekend less than a month into school, and Parents' Weekend three weeks later and it is a wonder we make it to Thanksgiving in one piece. This year was especially rough, but I'll save the whine about that for another time.I do want to

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1156942651022828502006-08-30T07:49:00.000-05:002006-08-30T17:40:17.810-05:00

It has long been a pet peeve of mine that very few web sites look good on a Tablet when it is in portrait mode. Not even the major Tablet PC sites seem to take this into consideration. To me, portrait is the natural orientation on a Tablet PC and web sites dedicated to Tablets ought to at least accomodate this, if not be designed specifically for it. But most aren't. Why is this the case?Here is

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1151699357089297082006-06-30T15:28:00.000-05:002006-06-30T15:53:29.153-05:00

Well, as I've said before, the slate is dead. I'd like to follow that by saying, "Long live the Slate," but unfortunately I can't.Since the TC1100 is no longer in production, we have had to select a new model Tablet PC for use at Vermont Academy. This was far from an easy task. We have finally made our decision, but before I reveal our choice, I would like to do a nickel review of the various

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1146776576434261482006-05-04T15:55:00.000-05:002006-05-04T16:02:56.503-05:00

I'm always surprised by how much time goes by without my realizing it. When I wrote my last posting, our quarterly trustees meeting had just occurred. This weekend is the next one, which means (obviously) that almost full quarter has passed. Sheesh! Where does the time go?Even though it has been a while, I want to follow up with some more of the little, and maybe not so little, things that make

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1140475282197510052006-02-20T17:27:00.000-05:002006-02-20T17:41:22.213-05:00

As often happens, I was recently asked what is the compelling argument for Tablet PCs over traditional notebook computers. That this came from a trustee at the quarterly meaning added a significant importance to the question and to getting the answer right.The problem is, I'm not sure there is a right answer to that question for most of us. But the question is the problem, not the lack of an

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1136579412805497432006-01-06T15:03:00.000-05:002006-01-06T15:30:12.823-05:00

One of the faculty members on our Tablet program advisory group has a real thing about power. The kind that computers require to operate, that is. He is (rightly) very concerned that we make sure that there are adequate sources of power available in classrooms so that students don't run out of juice in the middle of class. (Our suspicion is that this will be the new "my dog ate my homework"

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1131415975440425632005-11-07T21:04:00.000-05:002005-11-07T21:12:55.463-05:00

Imagine for a moment that you had a product that was innovative and unique in a market comprised largely of products that were all essentially timid me-too offerings. Imagine that your product had garnered a substantial share of the market because of its these qualities, and that it had a user base that bordered on the fanatic in their support and enthusiasm for your product. Would you throw that

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1129911796534136772005-10-21T11:23:00.000-05:002005-10-21T11:23:16.556-05:00

Blogger has a means of thwarting the bots that post comment spam so I am re-enabling comments for this blog. I hope that I can get back on track and actually post some new content, too.

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1128996640026204532005-10-10T21:07:00.000-05:002005-10-10T21:13:17.406-05:00

Owing to the sudden appearance of lots of comment spam, I am disabling comments on my blogs for the time being. This saddens me as the few comments I have received have had good things to say and this could be a good medium for discussion. But, owing to the self-centeredness of a few, the many lose out. Again.If Blogger.com can get it together to stop this kind of behavior, then I will reinstate

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1126988191805964442005-09-17T15:08:00.000-05:002005-09-17T15:16:31.816-05:00

I've long been a believer in the adage, generally attributed to Mark Twain's Puddin' Head Wilson, "Put all your eggs in one basket and -- WATCH THAT BASKET." For example, given limited technical resources and great technical demands, we opt for a single supported standard desktop OS and a single standard server OS. Sure Linux is a great OS, and I've run it on both servers and desktops (and even

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1122589789568590142005-07-28T17:19:00.000-05:002005-07-28T17:29:49.576-05:00

No matter how good your technical staff might be, supportive partners are critical to the success of a Tablet PC program. I have long thought that "partner" is an overused term as every salesman or manufacturer wants to "partner" with you, when too often all they really want to do is sell you stuff and then forget about you until your next order. What I mean by partner is someone who goes out of

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1118181037960793912005-06-07T16:40:00.000-05:002005-06-07T16:50:37.966-05:00

I've been doing some more thinking about the obstacles Tablet users face when confronted with the pen. I touched on this idea in Training I - Do your users think in ink? In that post, I suggested that a lot of folks had difficulty learning a set of skills different from, yet similar to, skills they already had mastered. Like a skier learning to snowboard, they found it frustrating to change

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1116688570376303292005-05-21T09:54:00.000-05:002005-05-21T10:16:10.390-05:00

Last time, I wrote about several important skills that need to be taught to our Tablet users, both students and faculty. Those skills mainly dealt with safety, either personal or of the system. All computer users need these skills, of course, but it becomes even more critical when the computer is ultra-portable and always connected as the Tablets are on our campus, and especially so in that they

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1115399138902656192005-05-06T11:54:00.000-05:002005-05-06T12:05:38.956-05:00

Along the lines of the topic of a previous post, Are We Empowering or Just Enabling?, there are a number of issues that will affect the success of a Tablet PC program that are not technical in nature and require education of our students and faculty to properly address. That article addressed the need for students to learn to deal with the ready distraction the Tablet provides them. Learning how,

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1114271181068097412005-04-23T10:38:00.000-05:002005-04-23T10:46:21.070-05:00

I sometimes get a sense from faculty members that they are overwhelmed.Generally, this is owing to them teaching several classes, having advisees, coaching, living in a dorm, regularly having comments and grades to do for all of the above, plus all the other responsibilities that go along with working at a boarding school. I suppose it is understandable...But I'm afraid I might be contributing to

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1113920965034662132005-04-19T09:16:00.000-05:002005-04-19T09:30:25.803-05:00

When I took my current position at Vermont Academy, one of the unintended consequences was inheriting a role of involvement with a conference called edAccess. edAccess (originally called just Access) stands for Administrative and Campus Computing Environments at Small Schools. The conference is unlike any I have ever attended elsewhere and one I would heartily recommend to any small college or

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1113513136439475282005-04-14T15:53:00.000-05:002005-04-14T16:12:16.443-05:00

In an earlier post (Training I - do your users think in ink?) I talked about the need for users to learn new skills that seemed disarmingly like skills they had already acquired--but which were decidedly different. This unexpected difference makes for a longer learning curve and can result in a higher frustration level, and potentially even with rejection of the Tablet by users. The proverb of

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1112649659145023302005-04-04T16:14:00.000-05:002005-04-04T16:20:59.150-05:00

When I think about the benefits that the Tablet can bring to a school, I tend to view them in three categories: benefits to the student, benefits to the teacher, and benefits to the class (and other collaborative groups) as a whole. While each category brings strong arguments in favor of Tablets over notebooks, for now I want to begin looking at some of the benefits in class.Vermont Academy has

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1112381807559428622005-04-01T13:49:00.000-05:002005-04-01T14:01:40.790-05:00

I was talking with one of the teachers in our pilot program a few days ago. While he has come to appreciate the usefulness of the Tablet PC himself, he had some concerns about using Tablets in the classroom. Now this wasn't really something I wanted to hear from someone I am looking to as a leader going forward in our project. Fortunately, as we talked further about what has been going on the

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1111767201474030752005-03-25T11:04:00.000-05:002005-03-25T11:13:21.480-05:00

I don't know exactly the number of students and parents who asked me if they could buy a different Tablet PC and join our program with it, but it probably numbers in the dozens. I want to talk about why I said "no" in these cases and why, at this time at least, we are sticking with a single standard model, purchased through the school.I am convinced that for a program such as ours to succeed, it

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1111604719388487022005-03-23T13:58:00.000-05:002005-03-23T14:05:19.393-05:00

We looked at a number of factors when the decision was made to adopt the "Vermont Slate", i.e., the HP TC1100, as our standard for hardware. There are a lot of fine machines out there, and different schools will place emphasis elsewhere than we did. I doubt that there is a wrong and right in this decision, but for us the "correct" answer seemed pretty clear-cut.One reason we opted for the TC1100

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1111427350776630392005-03-21T12:42:00.000-05:002005-03-21T21:14:52.240-05:00

On a less serious note, I wanted to talk about where this blog's name came from and introduce a discussion about why we chose the HP TC1100 as our Tablet PC of choice.Vermont was known in the past for the amount and quality of the slate mined here. You can still see a large number of older houses with slate roofs around the state. If you want to talk about durable building (especially roofing)

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1111177875458169992005-03-18T15:27:00.000-05:002005-03-18T15:31:15.460-05:00

"slick rick", who is one of our students, made a comment on the last posting that raised a good issue, but one which took the conversation in a new direction. Since the topic raised is already on my list of things to discuss, I'll dive into it now so that anyone interested in this topic can participate. The issue in question is security on the Tablets. By security, I mean not just anti-spyware,

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1110912968860812122005-03-15T16:55:00.000-05:002005-03-29T09:53:58.286-05:00

One of the issues that we face as we implement our Tablet PC program for both students and faculty is how to handle backups. The more ubiquitous, the more necessary Tablets become, the more critical it is that the information contained on them remains readily accessible--regardless of the vagaries of care or carelessness exhibited by the users. The last thing we want to do is put a program in

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1110559103321813012005-03-11T14:32:00.000-05:002005-05-25T15:32:24.636-05:00

I suspect that there will be a zillion posts here about training. There are so many issues involved and I am convince that it is a make-or-break issue for any Tablet PC program. I will kick this series off with a post that is more philosophical, kind of a stream-of-consciousness full of my musings-of-the-moment.Tablet PCs seem so normal in many respects. (Bear with me, here, if you disagree.)

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1110466147523176282005-03-10T14:54:00.000-05:002005-03-10T12:09:56.656-05:00

I made my proposal that Vermont Academy move to the Tablet PC platform in March of 2003. I had used the platform for a number of months, thought about pen computing for over 10 years, and realized that the TPC OS was very well done, the hardware was finally ready, and the combination had tremendous potential for education. In retrospect, that document clearly and accurately outlined a good view

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1110342807349774672005-03-09T02:33:00.000-05:002005-03-08T23:39:51.590-05:00

One of the features of our project at Vermont Academy is ubiquitous wireless networking. I will be addressing several aspects of this in forthcoming posts, among them security and availability, why we would do this when we wouldn't wire to the pillow, and implications for classes. This will probably be a topic for some time to come, actually, as we don't even pretend to have most of these issues

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1110336376381126202005-03-09T00:46:00.000-05:002005-03-08T21:46:16.386-05:00

I have been watching pen based computing since before the days of Windows for Pen Computing, which was released in 1992 (I think--that was a long time ago). Anyway I'd followed it in the trades before that but PenWindows was the first one I was able to get my hands on. I was fascinated, and saw a lot of potential, but given the state of both the hardware and the software, that potential was never

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11239974.post-1109976336681566072005-03-04T17:43:00.000-05:002005-03-10T12:03:47.446-05:00

This blog will chronicle the progress of the Tablet PC Program at Vermont Academy, a small independent boarding school in Saxtons River, Vermont. In my postings, you will get a healthy dose of personal opinion as well as being able to see what we are doing, what we are doing it with, and why we decided to do it that way. One of our stated goals for this project is share what we learn with other

Mark Paytonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06858175839274272285noreply@blogger.com2