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Classroom Notetaking Goes Digital With Tablet Devices

By Rhea R. Borja

The scrawled notes of math teacher Jeff Gallup, with his cramped but legible handwriting, filled the overhead-projection screen. On this mild November morning, his 7th grade students at Ocoee Middle School here watched as he highlighted the word "integers" in yellow and drew a lopsided circle around it.

Technology Page The students at the suburban Orlando school picked up thick black pens to copy his notes and started writing— not in traditional paper notebooks, but on their computer monitors, which rested on their laps or lay flat on their desks. With digital, touch-sensitive pens, the students wrote and highlighted words in blue, yellow, and pink, drew graphs and numbers, and even sketched smiley faces—all possible because they were using new technology tools called tablet personal computers.

Mr. Gallup's students are among the 150 7th graders at the 1,500-student Ocoee Middle School who are pilot-testing the tablet PCs in their core academic classes. For many students, the new devices have made ballpoint pens, paper, and even traditional hardbound textbooks...