K-12 perhaps holds the most promise in yet-fully-untapped potential of Tablet PC's in education. Students who have not yet-fully-mastered typing skills are more likely to embrace the natural unrestricted expression modality provided by pen and touch computers. The concept of communicating with a computer as if there is some smart paper that is able to understand student sketches and provide feedback is highly appealing. The ability of pen computers to act as smart paper and collaborative platforms opens a new dimension of technology in education. In this presentation, we will share our experiences working with k-12 teachers to develop pilot projects around pen technologies and will demonstrate some innovative pen-based applications developed at Carnegie Mellon University. We will emphasize the need to develop frameworks and networks that allow k-12 teachers to partner with universities to jointly collaborate on research projects. We will emphasize the need for new smart pen applications that are developed using solid human computer interaction principles. We also need innovative ways of looking at the utility of pen-based computers in education. We invite the community to join our efforts to share this wonderful technology through blogs and social networking sites. We can, and we should mobilize and show the world the potential of this new technology.

Ananda Gunawardena is an Associate Teaching Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). A long time advocate of Tablet PC's in education, Ananda was part of the Microsoft Research focus group on the use of Tablet's in 2004 and 2005. He directs several research projects that study and develop smart and usable pen based applications. In 2007, he developed a pen-based computing course and has taught the course since. A very popular upper level computer science course at CMU, his pen-based computing course had been responsible for developing number of pen applications that were deployed as research software to schools in several states. He is the co-author of two textbooks in computational linear algebra published by Springer-Verlag and Brooks-Cole. His textbooks have been translated into several languages. He has won grants from NSF, Microsoft research, HP, Qatar Foundation and several other organizations. He has published over 35 referred research articles in Journals. He is involved with number of startup companies and is the founder of Textcentric, Inc, a company providing customized textbook publishing software to major software publishing groups and he holds several patents. He serves on several boards and has won many awards including teaching awards, Jesse Jones service award, and Sri Lanka foundations exceptional achievement award, the highest honor given to a Sri Lankan expatriate. He received a B.Sc Mathematics special honors degree from University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, M.S. in computer science and Ph.D. in computational mathematics from The Ohio University and studied software Engineering at University of Texas at Austin.