We believe that it is our mission to educate children well so that they may lead the global community in the future. Our school provides consistent education in three stages (4 years x 3), covering a child's twelve formative years. The 3rd graders are in the first stage of their education where acquisition of basic and fundamental learning skills is emphasized.
In order to help them acquire basic learning skills, we utilize various approaches in addition to the use of UMPC. For example, we have introduced the electronic information board to all the ordinary classrooms to ensure that the study materials are shared effectively. To counter the tendency of the students' dislike of science, we have set up a new study subject called "Robotics."
Our school has 135 units of SmartCaddie UMPCs, and 122 3^rd grader students are the main users of them. Including the UMPC, we have installed over 200 Tablet PC school-wide. We believe that writing things down to remember them is the most basic skill of learning. Based on the belief, we consistently provide the Tablet PCs to our students.

UMPC ensure the continuity of learning, as the students can take the PCs home to study after school. During the summer break this year, the students were instructed to take their UMPC home and study with the Digital Kageyama Method (a piece of software to develop basic learning skills by repetitive drills of writing, reading, and calculating.)
1^st to 3^rd grader students took Kanji Official Approval test on October 27, and every student scored a passing mark. You cannot say that this result was attributable solely and exclusively to UMPC, however, we will investigate further to see if there is a correlation between the use of UMPC combined with the Digital Kageyama Method and the students' scoring passing marks, to clearly show the effectiveness of UMPC.
So far, we have used the Tablet PC mainly for repetitive drill exercises while we closely monitored the students' learning history. From now on, we are thinking of using them for investigative learning exercises outdoors, as the PCs are highly portable. Some ideas of such outdoor activities include the real-time presentation of graphics of the changing outside temperature that students can analyze, and use of the PCs as a hand-writing memo pad on field trips for social study. Our school also has a Media Center, a form of library, in the basement. We are thinking that the PCs may be used as multimedia players for the students to watch motion pictures, listen to music, and deepen their understanding through text materials.

(In reply to a question from a journalist asking what changes had occurred after digitizing the Kageyama Method)
The analogue version of the Kageyama Method, which is the method that people basically use papers, achieved the maximal learning effect by consistent and simple repetition of limited contents. This is an activity that a computer is good at doing. In the past, we needed to print the content on a lot of paper, but now we can see it on the computer display and do not need to print anything. It is effective for education because the learning data are digitally stored in the computer, and teachers and students can share the records visually. This is an ideal way of coaching a student, and the digitization of Kageyama Method using UMPCs was very significant.
And in this aspect, again, the most important point is the use of tablets. Adding a pen and a tablet to the conventional computer functionalities enabled the features that were lacking in computer-based learning in the past. Therefore, Tablet PC including UMPC are full of potential. It is possible to invent more and more new learning methods using the Internet and multimedia, and I am looking forward to tackling new challenges in this area.

(In reply to a question from a journalist asking whether it was possible to disseminate UMPC use to public schools)
The learning system combining the UMPC and Digital Kageyama Method has been put into practice in several schools in Sanyo Onoda City, Yamaguchi Prefecture, and Onomichi City, Hiroshima Prefecture. UMPCs are less expensive than the conventional notebook PCs, and some cities are moving toward a citywide deployment of UMPC to their schools. From these examples, I expect that there will be a jump in the dissemination rate of UMPC at some point in the future. There are many schools in need of replacing/upgrading their outdated computers, and I think that UMPC will be widely disseminated among public schools in the not-so-distant future.
I am a member of the government's Education Rebuilding Council and I have always maintained that every student in Japan needs to have a computer. If this idea comes true, all the study contents from the primary to the senior high school education levels could be pre-stored on the hard disc. If the contents need to be revised, the replacement/updating of the contents can be done in one or two weeks through Internet access. Compare that with the conventional way of updating teaching materials at the time of the government's revision of school curricula, which took two to three years to complete.
From these examples, I think that dissemination of UMPC to public schools should be seriously considered.

Our initiative in the world in the field of education is based on two approaches. One is "Partners in Learning," where we promote a program such as "Unlimited Potential" to help economically disadvantaged people who have difficulty accessing any educational method (In Japan, we collaborate with ICT Education Consortium under the program title of "ICT Promotion Program for Primary, Secondary, and High Schools"). Our aim is to provide training to 250 million people in 150 countries throughout the world by the year 2010.
The second approach represents our pursuit of new educational and learning methods through partnership with advanced educational institutions like Ritsumeikan Primary School. In addition to the NEXT Project in Japan, BackPack.NET in Singapore, and the School of the Future project in Philadelphia, USA, are underway.
We understand that Ritsumeikan Primary School has realized a speedier learning by its students using ICT, and that it recorded the best exam marks of the nation recently. We as Microsoft would like to learn from these practical and real cases and share what has been learned with many other schools.

This was my first opportunity to witness the positive effect of the NEXT Project, and I was extremely impressed. I think that we all witnessed the achievements of the use of ICT in the educational field. My daughter is going to school in Tokyo, and I wish my daughter's school had the technology introduced here at Ritsumeikan Primary School.
The educational solutions used today, especially the software for learning the kanji characters, were very interesting. The science class was like magic.
The issues and problems of these solutions can be identified only after you put them to use. We should not stop at designing the concepts and clarifying the themes, but we should always check how the solutions work for practical use.
I thank the teachers very much for giving us this precious experience today, and promise to extend our support continuously for your use of these resources for optimal effect.