Teach42

This just may be one of the most impressive implementations of technology for education since…. Hrrrm… Well, in a long time.

Via Tim Childers on the Tennessee DEN Blog

The official description is:

The Livescribe smartpen revolutionizes the act of writing by recording and linking audio to what you put on paper. Tap on words or drawings in your notes, and the smartpen replays recorded audio from the time you were writing. Transfer notes to your PC to backup, replay, and share them online.

But that doesn’t do it justice. You should really watch this video to a demo. Essentially it records what you’re listening to and notes what you write and when you write it. So if you click on a line of your notes, you’ll hear what the professor was saying at the time you wrote it. Of course, you can also rewind, fast forward, speed up and slow down.

This would have been a dream device for me when I was a student. I was always sloppy with my notes and would often spend hours trying to figure out why I circled three times “War/zoo analogy”. Seemed important at the time, but when it came time to study, I’d have to put on my Sherlock Holmes hat and try to figure out what the heck it meant. With this, I could double click, rewind a few minutes and just hear it again.

And that’s just the beginning. You can email the notes and audio, record and upload drawings, and much more. It does seem to use special paper, but it says on the website that the notebooks will cost about the same as a standard notebook.

For $200, I think it’s a pretty darn useful piece of tech. Can’t wait to see one in action.

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