Livescribe

I'm trying out a Livescribe Pulse pen (which I bought for myself as a pressie). Essentially, it is a pen that captures anything you write on special paper, and also records audio at the same time if you ask it to. The audio and writing are synched such that you can click on your paper and hear the audio, or you can create a pencast that plays back the writing and audio together.

I have some projects coming up where I think it will prove useful. I'm hoping that it will help with interviews with staff for case studies. Since buying it, I've discovered the good people in the Technology Enhanced Learning group upstairs are also trying them out. In their case, they are using them with students with learning difficulties. It will be great to see how they get on with it, and I'm sure it will prove to be useful to those students. I wish I'd had one when studying at University.

The best use for me so far has been in lesson planning. I write a plan on paper (which feels the most natural way to sketch this out). I can then write an extra not and orally rehearse the kind of thing I'll say at each section. I can later listen back to those bits by clicking the paper. One nice thing about this is getting away from the screen and also from PowerPoint whilst planning. I'm becoming overly reliant on the latter. It also puts the emphaisis for me back onto what I am going to say whilst planning, rather than the bullets and pictures for the slide. It's not that I think PowerPoint is not useful, but I think I prefer this text and aural planning first, and then work out how to add slides to complement the session.