Gourinchas found the solution to his concerns in the Tablet PC, a wireless, pen-based personal computer capable of combining the benefits of electronic multimedia presentations with the flexibility and spontaneity of traditional blackboard-style lecturing and discussion. Typically shaped like a large notepad and running on the Windows XP operating system, the tablet enables its user to handwrite searchable, digital notes on a touch screen, using a stylus. To instructors such as Gourinchas, being able to make annotations on electronic files, or to introduce blank screens for exploring new topics, is a welcome alternative to the typical PowerPoint format, which limits the ability to alter or augment material in response to questions raised by students.

For the undergraduate International Monetary Economics course he was to teach last fall, Gourinchas applied for and received a UC Berkeley Classroom Technology Grant to purchase a Tablet PC for use on a pilot basis. He considers the experiment to have been a success. "In previous years, a student might ask a question and we would branch off into a discussion about a topic of relevance that wasn't part of the PowerPoint presentation," Gourinchas explains. "I would have to turn off the computer and go to the blackboard, then do the whole operation in reverse to go back to the PowerPoint presentation. It was a huge distraction and slowed things down enormously. With the tablet, the presentation was more interactive and we could bring new material in very easily. My PowerPoint screens could be incomplete, allowing me to fill things in during the lecture, which is much more engaging as a learning experience for the students."

Tablet PCs have been available only a few years, and in many ways remain a well-kept secret. But as wireless networking becomes more prominent on campuses, the likelihood of tablets finding a more prominent niche between larger, keyboard-based laptops and smaller, pocket-sized PDA-type devices increases.

Tablets come with many advantages, such as software that can convert handwritten notes to digital text in a searchable format. They can capture drawings that would typically be put onto paper, as well as audio and traditional keyboard typing. But UC faculty such as Gourinchas and UCLA history professor Patrick Geary are less interested in the tablets' conversion abilities than in the added flexibility and interactivity they lend to presentations by enabling instructors to mark up the slides, just as they would with overhead projectors and other manual presentation systems, while continuing to reap the benefits of computer-prepared, reusable materials.

Geary recently used a tablet for his Medieval Conflict Resolution seminar, a text-heavy course that reviews Medieval-era documents in an effort to understand how conflicts were settled in European societies at a time when there were no central institutions of justice. "I was able to project these manuscripts onto the screen just as you would with PowerPoint, but with the writing function I could mark up the text without affecting the image," Geary explains. "I, or one of my students, would guide us through the text on the screen – underlining, circling, highlighting and inserting words in ways that would normally be impossible when projecting a document. In addition to being very visual, that helps to show students how to edit and analyze text." From a physical standpoint, Geary adds, the flat shape of the tablet facilitates better eye contact between the instructor and his or her students. UCLA's Office of Instructional Development currently has 10 tablet PCs available on loan to support undergraduate instruction.

Beth Simon, a lecturer in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at UC San Diego, began using Tablet PCs after becoming frustrated in her efforts to use prepared materials while maintaining a classroom atmosphere conducive to student participation. Before she began using tablets, Simon's answer was to create PowerPoint slides with a few key words that would serve as launching points for discussions. "The problem," she says, "is that sometimes my slides were so sparse that I would be in the middle of the class and unable to recall what I had been thinking at the time I made them."

Simon has been a collaborator with the University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering Educational Technology Group, which began working with Microsoft Research in 2002 to develop Tablet PC software called Classroom Presenter (available free for educational and research use at www.cs.washington.edu/education/dl/presenter/ ).

"Presenter makes it possible to use electronic prepared material such as high-quality pictures, video, or slides without losing the benefits of traditional blackboard-style lecturing," Simon explains. "You can still have spontaneous, free-form discussions where you're responding to the specific needs of your students. You can write on top of slides, or bring in blank slides through a feature called Electronic Whiteboard and write on those."

The software has been used twice at UC Santa Cruz by Charlie McDowell, a professor of computer science. "I create my lecture outline in PowerPoint and then export it to a special file format that is read by Classroom Presenter," he explains. "During the lecture, I toggle back and forth between the prepared outline and blank transparencies on which I write and edit codes. It works quite well."

Another feature, particularly conducive to the large classroom in which McDowell teaches, enables him to view both a console display and laptop on the podium; the console shows what the students see on the projection screen, while the laptop might carry information privy only to McDowell. "The students can view a full screen that is what you would typically see in a PowerPoint presentation, yet on my laptop I've got additional controls that I can see for changing the pen color, selecting whether I want to flip to a blank screen, or previewing the slide that's coming next," he says. The system also allows McDowell to shrink a PowerPoint slide so that it covers a smaller part of the screen, with a border down on the side or across the bottom, over which the instructor can write notes.

Simon and her colleagues at the University of Washington have gathered data on the extent to which Classroom Presenter is being used; as of early 2005, more than 30 instructors have employed the software in courses involving more than 5,000 students at more than a dozen institutions. Most of the uses have been in computer science, electrical engineering, and other science and engineering disciplines. "Those are the fields in which we know people, and so it's been easier to give out tablets and 'sell' it to faculty in those areas," Simon notes. "Now we're trying to push it into other areas. I'm very interested in thinking about how a humanities professor, for example, would make good use of tablets."

Tablet PCs will move into the mainstream of instructional use only when faculty members are informed of their benefits at the time they're contemplating their computer purchases, Simon contends. "Tablets really don't cost that much more than a high-end laptop," she says. "I've talked with many instructors who, after they learn about the tablet, say, 'I wish someone had told me about this before I bought my laptop; I would have spent the extra $200 and been so much happier with my teaching.' "

Simon and colleagues have found that most instructors who have switched to a Tablet PC using the Classroom Presenter system have begun applying it in ways that are not dissimilar from what they did in the past; this "base-case scenario," as Simon calls it, in which faculty merely present their old PowerPoint slides with a tablet rather than a laptop, represents a significant advance for all of the aforementioned reasons. But Simon also hopes that once instructors see the benefits of the tablet as a pedagogical tool, they will begin to alter their teaching style to take advantage of the new capabilities. One feature adopted early on by many faculty is the ability to make notes on slides that don't appear on the projection screen. Instructors can leave themselves reminders or answers to questions, with the annotations invisible to the audience.

Classroom Presenter has recently expanded to include classroom applications that facilitate more active learning on the part of students. With Student Submissions, students equipped with Tablet PCs are asked to write answers to questions or problems; they write their response in digital ink, submit it wirelessly to the instructor, and one or more student responses can then be displayed wirelessly to the entire class on the overhead projector, engaging students and providing the instructor with immediate feedback on the students' grasp of the presented material. A spin-off, Ubiquitous Presenter, enables students without tablets to access key components of Classroom Presenter with any Web-enabled device. Using a Web browser, students can view slides and ink that are broadcast by the instructor – albeit with a slight time delay – and submit typed text overlaid on the instructor's slides.

"Ideally, we would love to see entire classes of students equipped with tablets," says Simon. "But until we get to that point, this is a good solution." Simon has also experienced the middle ground – courses with a few tablets for students. In that scenario, she has students using the tablets submit their work wirelessly while other students use paper; displaying the work of the tablet-using students enhances learning for all students by pointing out common mistakes as well as alternate ways of solving the same problem, she notes.

McDowell of UC Santa Cruz hopes to move toward these applications. "The Tablet PC is definitely an interesting development – one I want to use more," says McDowell, who is one of a team of UCSC instructors who recently received a grant of equipment and money from Hewlett Packard to expand the use of tablets in the classroom. "We need further study to know for sure whether it's really helping students learn better, but I think anything we can do to move away from straight talking heads and toward more engagement of students is a good idea."