For me, without doubt this has been the year of gadgets. One of those to come into my life is the LiveScribe Smart Pen.
I’m not sure that it will take off in education, although I have heard that some schools are experimenting with it.
Fellow education.au blogger Tech-Ed Collisions (aka Jerry Leeson) described its advent at the beginning of last year.
And then Pru Mitchell wrote about it in the middle of this year. I inherited Pru’s pen.
First of all here is a link to a video on the LiveScribe site that shows the pen.
Then there is a comic YouTube video I’m sure you’ll enjoy
You’ll find on the YouTube site a number of other videos extolling the virtues of smart pens - and yes there is more than one brand, some even that use “regular” paper.
Anyway, my experiences are with the LiveScribe.
On their site there are some suggestions for classroom use in capturing an audio record of discussions, in parent interviews, for creating audio files for podcasts, for letting children hear what they sound like when they are reading etc. The site also provides resources and strategy guides in pdf format.
One of the things I have found very useful is MyScript for LiveScribe, which converts the notes you make on the digital paper into text that you can then copy into Word or Notepad for manipulation. Of course all OCR software, MyScript won’t transcribe perfectly if you have handwriting that has “peculiarities” which mine does, but you can get useable text. I’ve used it for taking minutes of meetings etc. It is very useful for checking those things oyu didn’t quite hear correctly the first time.
Today I’ve also discovered the pen can also be used as a simple calculator.
So how might we use it in education? Is it just an interesting gadget that will go the way of most interesting gadgets?
So far there have been some indications of how it might be useful in disability education, and as an assistive technology. What occurs to you?
For more information (e.g. pricing) check ITmadeSimple and OfficeWorks.
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