<p>I'll be buying a laptop soon (possibly pc) and was wondering if I really needed a tablet as well. I'm majoring in molecular biology and taking a bunch of sci/math courses. Would a laptop and simple pen and notebook paper suffice?</p>
<p>Certainly a laptop will suffice - it does for most college students. Tablets are cool and allow for drawing on diagrams and note-taking with a stylus. I think that I am going to get one in the near future, but if I don’t, I will be just fine with a typical laptop.</p>
<p>No, tablets are pretty useless. Pencil and paper is way better</p>
<p>I thought about getting a tablet, because they seemed really cool. And then I kind of realized it wasn’t an innovation - paper and pencil will do just fine. Tablets are super cool, but too small for my liking and too expensive for the glamor. I’d wait a few years.</p>
<p>You don’t need a tablet. I usually use OneNote on my laptop to take notes and good ol’ pencil and paper for drawings. When I get back home, I scan my pictures and paste them on my notes on OneNote.</p>
<p>If you’re going to major in molecular biology and take a lot of science/math classes, a regular laptop/netbook/PC/Mac/IPad is pretty much useless. You can take notes using pencil and paper in these classes, but I consider these paper notes to be “dead notes”. Can you annotate paper notes with Internet content? Can you search across notes for a particular name or concept? Can you sync your paper notes with an audio recording of the lecture? No, no and no. </p>
<p>Paper notes are, by nature, linear. Consider this: You’re taking Organic Chemistry 101. You have a $.50 paper notebook and a number 2 pencil. You meet every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Your paper notes are arranged by date (and nothing else). If your professor mentions something on Friday that explains more fully something he mentioned on Monday, do you write down in your Friday note page, to see last Monday’s lecture notes? Did you even realize that he made a connection? Well, do you? With MS OneNote, you can do all of that and more (works with typed and handwritten notes or any combination). </p>
<p>You’re sitting in a Calc 101 class. Again, pencil and paper in hand. Write down a problem and take out a calculator to find the solution. On a laptop, you could use LaTeX, a scientific notation program to “write” out your math problems. No solutions just typeset quality when you print them out. Learning LaTeX is not learning math. </p>
<p>A true Tablet PC has an active digitizer screen that recognizes handwritten input using a pencil like stylus. This is not to be confused with a multi-touch screen which translates finger movement gestures to scroll, zoom or select. The IPad Brushes app would allow you to “draw” an equation or molecule to the screen, but somehow, “finger-painting” your way through Calc and Organic Chemistry doesn’t seem quite right. </p>
<p>A Tablet PC is just like a regular laptop in that it has a keyboard that you can use to type notes with where appropriate. And it has a screen that will accept handwritten input in classes that don’t lend themselves to typing. </p>
<p>For molecular biology, you should know about a new Tablet PC application named “OrganicPad” that is being developed at Clemson University with a grant from the National Science Foundation. Sure, you can draw an organic compound on paper, but can you check to see if you drew it correctly? Will your piece of paper “tell” you that you linked a molecule incorrectly? With a Tablet PC and OrganicPad, you click the “Check” button, and the program will tell you if the compound is correct. </p>
<p>See: [OrganicPad[/url</a>]</p>
<p>[url=<a href=“| Public | Clemson University, South Carolina”>| Public | Clemson University, South Carolina]Photo</a> Gallery](<a href=“| Public | Clemson University, South Carolina”>| Public | Clemson University, South Carolina)</p>
<p>For math classes, you should look at MathJournal from Xthink Corp. You open the program on your Tablet PC and a graph paper background appears. You write down your math problem and hit the solution button. Done deal… Then you print out your homework in the LaTeX or MathJournal’s native MathXL format which looks like the examples you see in your textbook. </p>
<p>See: [url=<a href=“http://www.xthink.com/MathJournal.html]xThink[/url”>http://www.xthink.com/MathJournal.html]xThink[/url</a>]</p>