Speed School Tablet PC Update

A few days back I blogged about my experiences helping out new students with their Tablet PCs. (Starting the Semester off Sprinting + STUG) To my surprise I received an email from Brian Jones who manages the customer service department at DyKnow.

Since the semester started back up, I'm back producing episodes of Tablet Tips. The first episode of the Fall semester was centered around the same topic.



Brian sent me some feedback on the problems that I outlined. I'll post his response here:

“Quote: It seems like the Gateway models have some problem connecting to the server.” We also don’t know why some of the Gateway computers are experiencing issues connecting to the DyKnow server as well as why they miraculously connect later. We would recommend you have one or more students that can’t connect send us log files so we can provide you/them better insight into the issue:

• Click on the DyKnow symbol in the top left corner
• Click on ‘DyKnow Options’
• Click the ‘Resources’ option on the left menu
• Click the ‘Send Info’ button in the ‘Send Diagnostic Information’ section
• Complete the form and in the notes section please indicate that “My machine cannot connect to our DyKnow server.”
• Click ‘Send’ and wait for the information to transfer to us here at DyKnow before closing the dialog. Someone from our technical support staff and/or your local DyKnow administrator will respond accordingly.

“Quote: …the biggest problem with DyKnow was that student’s accounts were not activating properly.” From what I understand [and as alluded to] this is not at all related to the DyKnow server, but rather specific to an issue with the university’s user account authentication system (Active Directory as the IT dept would call it). I believe that issue should be resolved at this point, but if the student’s continue to have account authentication issues they are advised to touch base with U of L’s IT dept.

“Quote: …they are unable to send files from programs (such as DyKnow) into OneNote so they can be inked on.” This was interesting to us because we ironically got a support email from a student at U of L yesterday that was trying to print to OneNote from DyKnow via the 64-bit Vista OS. We shared the following MSDN thread with him http://blogs.msdn.com/david_rasmussen/archive/2008/04/21/onenote-64-bit-print-driver.aspx and also informed him that it is possible to ink on top of the DyKnow notes natively in DyKnow or use the resizable/un-dock-able Private Notes feature to add panel specific annotations in the DyKnow notebooks. Alternatively, students can condense their notes (e.g. two or four DyKnow panels per slide) by printing the content back into DyKnow using our Notebook Writer such to annotate the combined panels in that manner: www.dyknow.com/download.

I'd like to thank Brian for reaching out to me providing useful information that he has allowed me to republish on my blog. While the beginning of the year is eventful fixing all of the technical problems of the new students, I believe that it is a necessary problem when beginning the education of Tablet using students and future engineers.