Saint Mary's School, an independent all-girls' college preparatory school in Raleigh, is the first high school to deploy ThinkPad X41 Tablet PCs to students and faculty. The writable slate and unique functions of the ThinkPad X41 Tablets will help students and teachers discover new ways to work, learn, and interact in the classroom and on campus.
The school's ATLAS program is about Applying Tablets for Learning and Academic Success. Saint Mary's School will work with Lenovo to integrate tablets into the classroom and expects the technology will facilitate greater collaboration and more efficient and engaging lessons.
"Our teachers and students are raving about the ThinkPad Tablets from Lenovo in their classrooms," said Theo Wilkes Coonrod, Head of Saint Mary's School.
Tablet PCs enable Saint Mary's School faculty to approach traditional classroom exercises with an innovative twist. Music teachers can e-mail handwritten lessons in musical notation to student tablets for tailored homework assignments. In biology class, a student's well-executed molecular diagram can be instantly distributed electronically, instead of made into a transparency or drawn on the chalkboard.
"With my ThinkPad Tablet in writing mode, I can have geometry notes on a projection screen, highlight and color code items of importance and work out examples while facing the students. I can even refer back to previous examples, which I couldn't do when I had to frequently erase the board," said mathematics teacher Katie Bradbury.
The school selected the ThinkPad X41 Tablet for its weight, handwriting recognition capability and keyboard-to-writing slate convertibility to support classes in a liberal arts and sciences curriculum.
Teachers and students are now able to create and share images, diagrams, documents and research as they are developed for immediate feedback or to save or print for absent students.
Using tablet PCs, teachers can engage every student, whether they are an auditory or visual learner. In addition, the portability of the tablet expands lesson options. "When I am away from a classroom I can still use the functions of my computer as if I were in my office," said tennis coach Kathy Burke.
The computers come with a tool that can automatically reconfigure PC and network settings to find available wired and wireless connectivity, students can easily connect to the school's wireless network to submit or retrieve assignments.
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