Well, that is one way to think about it. Actually I am so excited to start that I had to remind myself I didn’t start Monday that I started on August 1st, then today my wife had to remind me that there are 31 days in July. So I am impatiently waiting for tomorrow to start.

What to do?

I am watching the #140edu conference online and writing. Really, I’m playing with the Lenovo ThinkPad tablet, so I can help teachers use it in the classroom. I started trying to tap away on the keyboard. While I was doing that the tablet would flash messages on the screen, “try swiping”. So I did. At first I swiped through a word and tapped the space bar between each word, then the tablet started flashing the message, ” you don’t have to press space between each word.” Cool! now if the tablet, or more correctly, the FlexT9 keyboard, is so smart why doesn’t it put a a space and capitalize the first letter after a period? (upon further review the problem is with the Google Drive app and not the keyboard as writing on the Google doc within a browser doesn’t have that problem)

i can see that this will be a great way to take notes during a meeting, but I think I will need more practice before using it to seamlessly write spontaneously. When I write I usually kind of unfocus my eyes and just let my fingers try to keep up with my brain. Which it kind of does and I don’t really have to think about it. This swiping is going to take a bit of practice.

I wonder is teaching kids how to type being disrupted? i used to think it was of paramount importance to teach kids to type because it was the primary interface with the computer. Yes, voice recognition is growing by leaps and bounds, but there is something about writing that forces a clarity of thought. I’m sure there is some brain research that backs that up, but I will allow you to do that research not me.

Now we have this new method of writing that is faster and easier to learn than typing and after just a half an hour of using it I find it is as accurate, if not more so, and as fast if not faster. In the space of this stream of conscious blog post I find that it is already as good as typing for me and will probably be better very soon. Well, after a quick edit i see I need some more practice, but I think with an edit on a regular computer i might really enjoy this kind of writing.