Papers

"Use of Classroom Presenter in Engineering Courses", by Richard Anderson, Ruth Anderson, Luke McDowell and Beth Simon, 2005 link to article

Classroom Presenter is a Tablet PC-based presentation system that allows instructors to regain flexibility in presentation using Tablet PC-supported digital inking in an application specifically designed for lecturing use. This systems aims to facilitate active and collaborative learning activities in engineering courses.
Presenter is a system which runs on a Tablet PC or a pen-based mobile computer and allows the instructor to handwrite over computer-projected slides.The slides and digital ink are then broadcast to other machines for students’ use.
This software has been used to support both traditional lectures and interactive lectures where students are making contributions from mobile computers.
Student inking is provided to allow personal note taking and to offer real-time, anonymous feedback on slides, to the instructor. Students write their solutions on the tablet and submit them wirelessly to the instructor, who can display one or more to the class, annotating the responses with ink. The responses can be saved for review after lecture, or made available electronically to the students.
Although flexible and expressive in presentations, the use of digital inking requires attention to a number of details like: legibility, color usage and clutter of ink which affect the comprehensibility of the presentation. The ink has the capabilities to convey meaning by shape and color and can be erased for further modification of the slides. Digital ink is erased both immediately and completely.
The Classroom Presenter software is available free for educational and research use and can be downloaded from the web.
The system is being used in an increasing number of disciplines at a range of institutions. It has been deployed in well over 200 courses in computer science, electrical engineering, and other science and engineering disciplines since spring 2002.

"Preliminary Experiences with a Tablet PC Based System to Suport Active Learning in Computer Science Courses", by Beth Simon, Ruth Anderson, Crystal Hoyer, Jonathan Su 2004 link to article

This paper presents an extension to Classrom Presenter, a well known, Tablet PC-based presentation system. This extension, named Student Submissions, aims to facilitate active and collaborative learning activities in the computer science classroom.
In this system students, or group of students are equipped with tablet computers and at various points during the lecture, are asked to solve a problem or respond to a question. Students respond by writing their solution on the tablet and submitting it wirelessly to the instructor. The responses are displayed to the class without student names and can be annotated by the instructor to draw attention to key points. At the end of lecture, students’ responses can be saved for use in the next lecture or for posting to the course web site for further discussion.
The system facilitates classroom activities and interaction with the instructor.Examining actual student responses is a good way of uncovering common difficulties that the instructor may not anticipate. Discussing these errors in class can prevent students from making the same errors in the future. The instructor may also choose to show a common error, a correct answer or a particularly creative solution.
The Student Submissions system had a small number of deployments, but is gaining popularity through de need of active and collaborative learning in classroom. It provides several improvements over traditional methods for incorporating problem solving and active learning experiences into lecture and for sharing student solutions with the class.

"Pedagogical Techniques Supported by the Use of Student Devices in Teaching Software Engineering", by Valentin Razmov and Richard Anderson, 2006 link to article

This paper makes the case that current technology can support pedagogical techniques that promote active student engagement and diversity of ideas in the classroom.
It is discussed how one particular software system for Tablet PCs (Classroom Presenter) can increase the effectiveness and flexibility of pedagogical techniques. This software aims to facilitate active and collaborative learn ing activities in the computer science classroom. At the start of a lecture the instructor broadcasts a deck of slides to Tablet PCs on student desks. Slides are projected on a big screen, too. When a slide describing an activity is reached , students are asked to write a response on their tablets using a digital pen and then submit the responses to the instructor. The instructor selectively displays some of them to the class, setting up the atmosphere for discussion. For an instructor the key thing for this style of teaching is being able to work with the student submissions in real time, developing on-the-fly responses to individual submissions.
This article also describes a set of pedagogical techniques employed in the classroom to promote student involvement and increased interaction between students and instructors.
One important technique is to create atmosphere for student to engage in an activity. This may be achieved by brainstorming activities before the corresponding material is formally covered in class. Also an important technique is to encourage all students to express their opinions. Technology offers one convenient way to help achieve this, through the use of anonymous student ink submissions. Asking students to share their answers exposes them to a diversity of viewpoints and provides a meaningful opportunity to evaluate and compare different approaches to the same problem.It is also a good way of uncovering common difficulties that the instructor may not anticipate.
Another important pedagogical technique is team work. Students exchange ideas on a particular topic and help each other to construct new knowledge, rather than have it served by instructors and passively consumed.
This Tablet PC-based system was considered effective from the pedagogical point of view. There was a high rate of student participation and ample discussions generated by the activities. The use of tablets was well received by students.

"A study of Digital Ink in Lecture Presentation, by Richard J.Anderson", Crystal Hoyer, Steven A.Wolfman, Ruth Anderson, 2004 link to article

This paper presents a study of the particularities of digital ink in lecture presentation. The study was made by analizing archives of slides annotated with Classroom Presenter. The Classroom Presenter is a well-known Tablet PC-based annotating system, which was presented in previous articles.
The themes of interest in this paper are:

the frequent use of ink in a manner analogous to physical gestures
the tension between the ephemeral meaning of ink and its persistent representation on the display
the moderate use of system features by the instructors

Regarding to the first point, the article makes reference to the attentional marks. Attentional marks are ink annotations which provide linkage between spoken context and the shared display. These marks are often arrows, circles, underlines, checks, ticks and so on. Instructors generally use attentional marks analogously to physical hand gestures.
Regarding to the second point, ink is represented persistently in that it remains visible until explicitly erased or hidden by a slide transition. In contrast, spoken words and physical gestures have no persistent, external representation. They must be perceived when they occur, or they are lost. Much of the preserved ink is difficult to understand without its context. In this sense ink’s meaning is ephemeral. Most of the information provided by the ink comes from spoken context and the order in which things were drawn, but the static image does not show this information. One solution to this problem is making annotations using written text.
Regarding to the third point, it was observed that some of the features provided by the Classroom Presenter like: highlighter, color change, page erase, stroke erase, were used in different, usually low, percentages by the professors. Concearning this problem system designers should become more conscious that busy and focused instructors may respond to new features, new buttons, or new mode changes by ignoring them. The best designs may be those that work smoothly without effort or thought on the instructor’s part.

"Lecture Presentation from the Tablet Pc", by Richard Anderson, Ruth Anderson, Crystal Hoyer, Beth Simon, Fred Videon, Steve Wolfman, 2003 link to article

This paper presents an overview of the Classroom Presenter, with focus on two of its features:

a facility for supporting multiple versions of slides for instructor notes
a facility for delivering student feedback in real time to the instructor

Classroom Presenter is a Tablet PC-based system for presenting lectures, developed by the University of Washington.The system was studied by observing classes, capturing sessions with a logging tool and conducting a survey of students and instructors. Instructors and students were enthusiastic about the systems’ ability to create a more spontaneous and interactive classroom environment.
Classroom Presenter was used in a distance learning environment. Two learning sites were used: a site on the university campus and a site at Microsoft. Te instructor delivered lectures at the local site, while a video image of the instructor and the presentation were displayed at the remote site. Each site was equipped with video conferencing equipment, projectors, cameras and microphones.
Classroom Presenter supports “instructor mode objects” – text or drawings visible only on the instructor tablet view and not shown on the projector view. These objects can contain reminders, notes, or hints to the instructor of issues to discuss in relation to the slide or questions to ask the students. These objects can also encapsulate information that the students will be asked to actively derive in-class.
CFS (Classroom Feedback System) is a feature developed in order to deliver student feedback in real time to the instructor.It was enabled with three categories of generated feedback:

MORE EXPLANATION requests elaboration
EXAMPLE requests an illustrative example
GOT IT indicates understanding

These three options appear in a menu when students click a location o a slide.
CFS was proved to be a success in promoting interaction and revealed interesting interplay with the challenges.

"An evaluation of a broad deployment of DyKnow software to support note taking and interaction using pen-based computers", by Dave Berque, 2006 link to article

This paper, describes a departement - wide deployment of DyKnow, a project started at the DePauw University and which, nowadays, is a well known system that allows active and collaborative learning, during a course.
DyKnow supports collaborative note taking; classroom interaction; out of class review, replay and grading of classroom materials; and computer monitoring .
This software helps students to develop a multi-page electronic notebook for each class perioad. The notebook includes content provided by the teacher supplemented with private student annotations.
DyKnow has numerous features that support active learning:

pooling: allows instructors to present a multiple choice poll to the class.
student submissions: allows students to share complex work with the teacher or with the class.
student control: allows students to share work with the class on a stroke-by- stroke basis.
embedded web pages: live web pages can be embedded in a DyKnow notebook and transmitted to students along with other DyKnow content.
demonstration mode: allows applications to be demonstrated to the entire class.

DyKnow supports computer monitoring features that instructors can use to gauge student progress and focus student attention. Additional monitoring functionality allows the teacher to send messages to individual students, groups of students or to the entire class.The teacher can blank student screens and can lock mice and keyboards.
At the end of each class students can print their notes (to paper or to PDF file), or they can save their notes electronically.These can be stored to disk or to the DyKnow server.
The DyKnow server is a licensed product, but the client software is free and can be downloaded from www.dyknow.com.
DyKnow teaching tools run on Tablet PCs, interactive pen dislays and graphics tablets, as well as on standard laptops and desktops.
Both students and teachers which were asked to express their opinion regarding the DyKnow system, concluded that this system is very efficient in the process of active and collaborative learning.

"Ad-hoc Collaborative Document Annotation on a Tablet PC", by Albert Huang (2003) link to article

This paper presents a collaborative annotation system that allows students equipped with tablet computers to work cooperatively in a either an ad-hoc or a structured wireless classroom setting.
This project, named The Electronic Student Notebook aims to investigate the potential of an electronic notebook as an educational tool, with the intention of eventually supplanting the paper notebook in the classroom.
The electronic notebook has the potential to address the organizational difficulties of paper notebooks by providing an intuitive and user-friendly interface for managing documents. Notes taken during class, along with lecture slides or documents distributed by the professor, can be saved and easily accessed later on by the student with the click of a button.
Clients should be able to:

annotate a variety of different document
select sharing policies for annotations on documents.
distribute shared documents and annotations to other clients in a secure and e-client manner.
retrieve previously shared and annotated documents for review and further annotation.

An annotation is defined by three properties:

User : The identity of the user who created the annotation.
TimeStamp : The date and time that the annotation was received on the local client
Data

In this implementation , annotations are described as strokes of ink interpretable by the Microsoft Tablet PC SDK.There is a document cache which serves as a repository where all documents and annotations are stored. Each session contains its own document cache, which it uses to maintain persistent local copies so that the user can return later on and review the results of a collaborative session.
The Electronic Student Notebook was implemented in C# and the Microsot .NET Framework. The GUI was built based on the Tablet PC SDK that interprets pen strokes as annotations. Supported document formats (pdf, word, powerpoint, etc.) are exported into Windows Metafile (WMF) images and used as an image underlay on which users are able to write and draw notes.

"A graphical annotation platform for Web-based e-learning", by D.Giordano and S.Mineo, 2005 link to article

Making annotations on a text has many advantages in the learning process.In electronic learning, graphical annotation seems to be more attractive and efficient than the textual one, and can be used both as a personal learning resource and a modality of sharing information. The purpose of this paper is to present a graphical annotation system for a distributed e-learning architecture.
Several web annotation technologies are briefly presented, namely ThirdVoice (http://thirdvoice.com), Annotea (http://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea), Ontomat (http://annotation.semanticweb.org/tools/ontomat). These technologies support the exchange of textual data to be attached to Web pages, but do not allow the treatment of graphical elements.
The graphical annotation system proposed by the authors is for a distributed e-learning architecture.
The system consists of three components:

a database server that stores and retrieves annotations;
a client that allows users to create and search annotations and
a PHP-based portal that processes the client annotations’ requests.

On the client side there is the Web Annotator Plug-in, that is an application developed as a plug-in for Internet Explorer. The core of the plug-in was written in Java, enabling the user to create and save, by using a tool panel, graphical annotations on screenshots of Web pages. Once annotated the image can be sent by e-mail or to the Graphic Annotation Server where it is stored and indexed.
This system is not affected by potential orphaning problems because the page context is always included in the grabbed snapshot .
The plug-in offers other functionalities like: checking if the current page has been annotated, users login and logout, search by keywords the annotations archive and so on.
The database stores and manages information about the users (usernames, passwords, courses) and about annotations(courses, URLs of the page being annotated, text content).
The intermediate between the web server and the database is a web application written in PHP that has the following functionalities: users’ login and authentification, accept page visualization requests from users, check whether on these pages there are annotation , search annotations, insert annotations and so on.
Another interesting feature is the Web Annotator Forum , where for each annotation it is possible to reply and generate discussion.
The graphical annotation systems like the one presented in this article are particularly important in the light of current developments of mobile learning, where contents are accessed through PDA or hand-held devices which naturally afford pen-based interaction.

"Annotating the Web: An Exploratory Study of Web Users’ Needs for Personal Annotation Tools", by Xin Fu, Tom Ciszek, Gary Marchionini, Paul Solomon, 2005 link to article

This paper investigates the needs of web users for personal annotation tools. It is studied how web users utilize existing annotation tools for personal annotations, their likes and dislikes of these tools, and what features would be desirable but are presently unavailable.
It was examined the practice of making annotations on paper as well as the use of annotations and their functionality in the context of hypertext.Three forms of annotations were observed:

text selection and emphasis : highlighting, underlining or circling a group of words, drawing stars, asterisks or other symbols in the margin adjacent to certain sections in the text.
building association : links or relations by making notes and drawing symbols
resegmentation of the document: which often happens when the physical structure of the document does not suit the reader’s purposes

The study shows that text selection and association building through notes or symbols remain the dominant forms of annotation on the web, while structural annotation (resegmentation) and layout annotation (change of font , color, etc.) are also prevalent.
The functionality and implementation of existing web based annotation systems varies greatly. Based on the method of implementation four major types of annotation systems were identified:

annotation facilities in standard web browsers
website supported annotation systems
interactive web publication forums

web annotation engines

Twenty one web users participated in the study and were asked to express their opinion about the annotation systems presented above. It turned out that the most popular were the annotation facilities provided in standard web browsers and the less used ones were web annotation engines.

"On Web Annotations: Promises and Pitfalls of Current Web Infrastructure", by Venu Vasudevan and Mark Palmer, 1999 link to article

This paper describes some of the authors’ experiences with client and proxy-server based implementations of the annotation system architecture. These annotations systems seemed to have had missing points, at the time this article was written and the authors discuss potential changes to the web architecture that might make the implementation of annotation systems more complete.
From the authors’ experience, annotations systems are constrained both in capability and efficiency by the limitations of current web infrastructure. The web annotation framework described in this paper can be viewed as a specialization of the intermediary architecture. This architecture lies between client and server and consists of:

interceptors which trigger the annotation process
annotation repository service (AReS) used by composers to retrieve annotation sets appropriate to the document , user and context
composers which are used to manufacture annotated content

To efficiently compose annotation sets with document content, composers operate on a document abstraction known as DOM(Document Object Model). The DOM provide high-level API for composers to directly access locations in the document where annotations are to be inserted and facilitates efficient composition. The DOM may be provided by an application module , or inherently by the annotation infrastructure. There are three types of interceptors:

request interceptors: intercept an outgoing document URL request and redirect the request to a URL that returns the document augmented with annotations.
page interceptors : trap the contents of the web document being retrieved and pass it along to the annotation system to be augmented
event interceptors: detect some event related to document retrieval by subscribing to an event channel. AReS (Annotation Repository Services) has the ability to create annotation objects with attributes specifying the author, timestamp, URL of annotated document and anchor information about the placement of annotation sets within the document URL.It is useful for annotation servers to deliver annotation sets in metadata formats like XML which are easily parseable.

Composers are categorized as:

stylistic : choosing a customized presentation scheme for the annotation sets to visually distinguish them from document content
versioned: taking the versioning semantics of both the document and the annotation sets into account.
semantic: applies to structured annotations which may or may not be visibly presented along with document.
There are presented two concrete implementations of the above architecture:
- InterNote is a system that transparently annotates web content using a request interception architecture. A proxy server intercepts requests from browsers for web documents. The proxy server then redirects the request to the appropriate composer, depending on the kind of stylistic, versioned or semantic composition dictated by the user model and document type. The composer retrieves annotations from one or more AReS’es and returns the composed content to the web browser. The InterNote application proxy server is implemented using Jigsaw, a Java web server distributed by the World-Wide Web consortium. Annotations can be embedded at HTML anchors by value as textual hyperqueries, or hyperqueries whose results are rendered by specialized viewers.
- JotBot is a client-centered annotation system. The annotations can be accessed by common web browsers without needing to configure and run an intermediary proxy on the client. The composer is a Java applet that retrieves and presents annotations. The annotations can only be associated with a page and not placed within it.

"A context for Pen-Based Mathematical Computing", by Elena Smirnova & Stephen M.Watt, 2005 link to article

This article presents an investigation to determine an architectural framework for pen-based matematichal computing. The framework has to be integrated with suitable elements for pen computing, document processing and computer algebra. Also, the proposed framework is required to allow a high degree of platform independence for the development of pen-based mathematical software.
This paper outlines the technologies that may be used as elements with an interface for pen-based mathematics, then the portability issues are discussed and finally the large-scale aspects of the designed architecture and some of the implementation issues are presented.
Pen-based software for mathematics has unique aspects. First the set of symbols used in mathematics is much larger than the usual alphabets, second there is no vocabulary for mathematics that can be used in context-based expression recognition and third the mathematical notation has a more complex structure.
While the existing technologies like: Digitizer Device Drivers, Tablet PC SDK, C#/.NET, Maple provide high-levels of functionality useful in ink applications, none is suitable for the needs mentioned above. In particular these elements do not all work together. The wanted solution must combine these technologies in such a way that the final architecture can provide high-quality ink capabilities, while remaining portable across platforms and providing the flexibility of easy connection with applications.
The architectural approach presented in the article requires that components that are responsible for dealing with ink processing and mathematical structures manipulation should be platform independent. These components are:

the high-level mathematical object manipulation code (Java)
the low-level ink analysis code (raw C++).

The parts that shall vary with the hosting system and platform are:

platform – specific basic ink software to collect traces and support the abstract ink classes
the inter-component interface code to link the low-level ink-processing module and the high-level mathematical object manipulation part
system-specific interface code for embedding within the host application. The last part of the article describes some implementation issues. The portable architecture is instantiated for the Tablet PC, using as the basic ink software the Tablet PC SDK. The linkage mechanism is complex because requires interoperability between SDK ink-collector( implemented in .NET), ink analyzer (implemented in C ++) and math object manipulator ( implemented in Java).

"A study of Diagrammatic Ink in Lecture", by Richard Anderson, Ruth Anderson, Crystal Hoyer , Craig Princea Jonathan Su , Fred Videon , Steven Wolfman, 2005 link to article

This paper presents a study of how instructors use diagrams in a series of computer science lectures. The purpose is to understand challenges and opportunities for automatically analyzing diagrams, and to use this to improve tools to support the delivery of presentations and the viewing of archived lectures.
The lectures are electronically delivered and digital ink based technologies are used to annotate slides that support the courses. In many situations , the ability to draw spontaneous diagrams to sustain expositions greatly enhances communication.In this paper are explored the properties of these naturally drawn diagrams delivered during lectures.
There were observed three key phenomena:

Ink classification: The spontaneous and interactive nature of lectures makes diagram understanding difficult in this domain. A particularly important problem is separating the diagram from its annotations and other surrounding ink. It is noted that a common feature of lecture diagrams is their annotations with attentional ink. It is stated that attentional ink represents a significant fraction (50-75%) of the total writing during the lecture. This problem is challenging since the different types of ink often are geometrically similar.
Diagram phasing: Instructors frequently use a diagram in multiple phases, with additional diagrammatic ink added at each phase. The problem is to identify the “key frames” and extract a sequence of diagrams corresponding to exposition. This means that for a diagrammatic understanding the entire drawing process as a whole must be analyzed and understood – it is not enough to just analyze the end result.
Locality of focus: Often, only portions of a diagram are used to make individual points, while the overall diagram becomes inconsistent. The problem is to identify the local portion of the diagram that relates to the particular point being made.

"PACT: A Pattern – Annotated Course Tool", by Andy Carle and John Canny, 2005 link to article

PACT (Pattern – Annotated Course Tool) is a visual editor in which learning objects in a curriculum can be viewed, manipulated, and annotated with references to pedagogical patterns.
Users can explore well-designed, well-annotated courses to better inform their own design process. PACT is designed to help bridge the gap between traditional ways of teaching and learner-centered ones . The key innovation of PACT is its focus on pattern-annotated courses that connect the abstract ideals of pedagogical patterns to learning environments that exemplify these principles in concrete instances. A pedagogical pattern relates a class of learning objects or general course structures to a generalized goal.
Instructors can see learner-centered courses designed by experts along with the patterns that have guided their design. It provides a tangible representation from which instructors can proceed to deeper understanding of the theory and application of patterns and principles. And it serves as a practical tool to expedite the organization and re-use of course content that was designed with solid pedagogy in mind.
The PACT is a potential set of tools to assist in the development and maintenance of a repository of pedagogical patterns and courses. It supports course creation in several ways:

starting with an existing course, an instructor can modify elements of it such that the pattern structure acts as a guide;
an instructor can start with one or several abstract patterns and combine them with learning objects to build a new course that follows good learning principles (e.g.inquiry-based, other constructivist, cooperative etc.);
when an instructor has completed a course, he or she can contribute the course with its instantiated patterns to the repository;
instructors can construct new patterns that they have found successful from their courses and contribute them to the repository;
instructors can review and rate patterns, learning objects and courses that they have made use of from the repository, and those reviews can be shared with other instructors .

"Development of a Targeted Tablet PC Software Development Course", by Roy Pargas link to article

This project was one of the recipients of the “Tablet PC and Computing Curriculum 2004 RFP Awards” , issued by Microsoft Research. The author proposed the development of a new course CPSC 481/681: Tablet Software Development, designed for senior undergraduate / first – year graduate computer science students and offered by the Clemson University Computer Science Departament.
This course had the following goals:

to teach both undergraduate and graduate students the skills necessary to develop exciting and useful Tablet PC software.
the software developed, to provide new instructional material targeting an existing laptop-enhanced course being taught at Clemson University.

The project will consist of three phases during a typical fifteen-week semester:

In phase 1 , the instructor lectures on topics such as: Visual Studio.NET, C# and APIs specifically designed for Tablet PC software development. Students are given programming assignments , each focusing on one or more of the concepts from the topic above.
In phase 2 , the students select, design and implement a large project. Students may work individually or in teams.
In phase 3 , the instructor organizes mini – conferences, in which students must present their work, demonstrate the functionalities of their software and must answer the audience’s questions. Finally the students must write the documentation: a 5 – to – 10 page Technical Reference Manual and a a 5 – to – 10 User’s Manual.

After the semester ends all the projects are collected and all the source code is organized into a single web-site. This project was put in practice since 2004 and the results are currently available at the following URL: http://www.cs.clemson.edu/%7Epargas/463web/index.htm

"A Collaborative Undergraduate Course for Pen-based Computing using Tablet PCs", by Daniel G. Aliaga, Gustavo Rodriguez-Rivera, Dongyan Xu, 2005 link to article

This article presents a course developed at Purdue University, that allows computer science undergraduates to explore non-traditional human-computer interfaces, to implement novel pen-based applications, and to give them hands-on experience in developing team projects.This course was funded by the Microsoft Research Tablet PC Curriculum Group in 2004. A major challenge for enabling such courses during undergraduate studies includes providing foundations, in terms of software, hardware, and teaching paradigms.
During each semester, students are individually given a Tablet PC and,optionally,some additional hardware. Under the guidance of the instructor, a general topic is chosen for the semester and the students self-organize into several 2 to 3 person teams. The students hold public demonstrations at the end of the semester to showcase their projects. Diversity amongst the applications is strongly encouraged and the organization supports significant freedom.
The presented course has resulted, so far, in the following three categories of applications: digital-paper applications, camera-based applications, and location-aware applications.

Digital Paper Applications:
- Puppet : a project that enables users to quickly and easily draw and animate digital characters using a pen-based interface
- Sketch : a project that quickly sketch architectural structures for rapid prototyping and visualization.
- Captain’s Log: a program that allows flight controllers to keep interactive log
- VCNR: a program that records computer presentations for later playback.
Camera – Based Applications:
- CheckMate: the objective of this project is to design an autonomous and portable mixed-reality system that enables a Tablet PC to play chess against a human using a standard chessboard.
- SuperImposer: a project that creates a stage for virtual and real-word imagery
Location-Aware Applications:
- ActiveMap: the goal of this project is to create a location-aware map program for Tablet PCs.

"Teaching with Tablet PC’s", by Kenrick Mock, 2004 link to article

This paper describes the author’s experience using the Tablet PC to conduct two computer science courses. The first course consists of hand-written material and the second uses power point slides. For both courses the Tablet PC was used in the classroom as a digital whiteboard by connecting it to a data projector. The lecture material was achieved and accessed electronically for future reference by the students.
Regarding the first course, the tablet was successfully integrated. The machine was connected to a data projector and Microsoft OneNote was used in place of the blackboard.This presented numerous advantages over the blackboard like:

the lecture can be conducted entirely by drawing in digital ink without preparing material in advance
the instructor can easily redisplay previously covered material that would normally have been erased on a blackboard.
easy to switch to other applications
convenient access to multiple pens in different colors
digital ink can be saved and viewed later through a web browser
the instructor maintains eye contact with the audience while lecturing

Microsoft OneNote provides the option to store a page of written notes as a .mht file for viewing in a web browser. TechSmith’s Camtasia Studio is used to capture the screen and audio into an AVI file. The AVI video was then converted into Flash format and linked to the course web page. Sample video recordings are available for viewing at : http://www.math.uaa.alaska.edu/~afkjm/cs201/calendar.html. Regarding the second course, this was conducted primarily using slides developed in PowerPoint. Both Office XP and 2003 enable the annotation of ink on presentations slides. It was observed that is more easy to draw and create figures and diagrams using a pen than a mouse.
Very positive feedback was received from students. They preffered the Tablet PC over traditional blackboard.