ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY BLOG | INVENTIONS FOR PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES

Tonight, I was teaching my graduate course and we covered different strategies that can be employed for students note taking. We spoke about outlining, mind mapping, and giving students partially filled in materials to help them with note taking skills. This lead me into a demonstration of marrying the Cornell Note Taking Method with the Livescribe Smartpen. I divided the page in my Livescribe notebook into the necessary columns and explained to my students how this could be used in the classroom to help students record the main ideas of the lecture. With the Livescribe Pulse pen I was able to demonstrate how a student could easily review the material that was recorded and how teachers could use the pen to embed the notes in a Learning Management System. At the college we are presently using Moodle as our Learning Management System and wanted to show my students how we could deliver the notes on the web using the Livescribe technology.

To get started I had my student take some short notes on the page and I sent the page to My Livescribe account. Once the page was successfully uploaded to my Livescribe account I made it public and clicked on the option to copy the Embed Code. Once I copied the Embed Code I went back to Moodle and using the Create A Web Page option - pasted the embed code and voila the page could now be played within my Moodle course for all of my students to see and listen to. Using this technique it is possible to embed Livescribe notes to wiki's as well as blogs. Livescribe makes sharing your notes a cinch and if you choose to you can view your notes on an iPhone or iPad using the Pencast app. So give these techniques a try and let me know how they work for you. Your students will be glad you did.