Solving the Diagram Dilemma

Creating an online tutorial is quite easy if you just want text, photos, and voice. PowerPoint with narration can do a fine job but when you want to add diagrams, the task can become a lot more time consuming, especially if you want to show stages of development. You could have someone take a video of you explaining the concepts while you draw on your whiteboard, but the labour required is a deterrent. The Smart Pen provides a very simple alternative.

Smart Pens for Students

Livescribe introduced Smart Pens a few years ago for students to record notes and lectures. The pen contains a tiny camera that records what is written in a special note book and the microphone records the lecture. The software for playing the recordings is very clever. Students play back the recording on their computer and the voice is synchronised with the appropriate writing or drawing.  Students can touch their pen on any part of their notes or diagrams and the audio plays from that part of the recording, so replaying a passage is quick and very simple.

When the pen is docked with the computer, the software transfers to recording to the computer. With a mouse click, the software can upload the new recording to a YouTube style  website where they can be shared. Livescribe calls these shared recordings Pencasts. They use Flash format.

To get a better understanding of the procedure, watch the short video clips on this page.

For Teachers Too

The Smart Pen and Livescribe software provides a very simple way for Science teachers to create simple online tutorials and share them with students. You just sit at your desk with the pen and Livescribe notebook, touch the record symbol on the page and start speaking while you draw. When you have finished, touch the stop symbol. Then dock the pen so the tutorial can be transferred to the computer and click the upload button. Within a few minutes from when you stop recording the tutorial can be ready for students. You can provide a link to the tutorial or embed it on a web page such as a blog or a page in your learning management system.

Here is a simple example - nothing starry and it even has a mistake in it, but it provides students with a helpful learning experience. Notice that you can make it full screen with the click of a button and at the bottom left you can control the display mode for your writing and sketching. The default is to have everything grey to begin with and it gets over-written with the green colour as you proceed through the tutorial.

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