Enhancing the Classroom Experience: Instructor Use of Tablets

Instructors continually search for innovative approaches to interact with and engage students in the classroom. The tablet offers a potential innovation for this purpose. Tablet devices from Apple, Microsoft, and other hardware vendors have overcome many of the challenges of the past (e.g. cost and limited applications) to become useful tools for instructors. Our paper examines instructor use of tablet devices by evaluating current tablet hardware and software solutions. A number of teaching tasks are evaluated to understand how they can be enhanced with tablets. These teaching tasks are utilized in a numbers of classes followed by an examination of student perceptions of tablet technologies in the classroom. Our results suggest that tablets are an effective tool with students rating instructor effectiveness as high compared to traditional classroom approaches. Based on results from student feedback, we recommend continued tablet use in the classroom.