Products
Product: Livescribe Echo Smartpen
10/1/2010 By:
www.livescribe.com Retail price: starts at $199.95
By Gwen Solomon
The Echo smartpen is an electronic pen that captures audio
and written notes (on their paper, purchased or printed out)
and places them on a Livescribe Desktop for playback. It
also plays back audio directly from the pen.
Quality and Effectiveness: Overall, the Echo smartpen
is an effective tool for helping students take notes, helping
teachers provide instructions, and helping students learn
from those instructions. Along the way, the pen provides
features such as a calculator, a spelling tool, and crib sheets
on basic facts about states and presidents. Teachers can
create an interactive Flash movie called a pencast and post
the notes online, email them, or embed them on a Facebook
page, a blog, or a class Web site. A student can plug in the
pen and transmit these notes to the Livescribe Desktop on
a computer. Another exciting feature is the voice-to-text
capability. The related product MyScript for Livescribe turns
handwriting into text for Word rather than for the Livescribe
Desktop (provided the handwriting is clear). This add-on is
available for a 30-day-free trial or purchase.
Ease of Use: The instructions are clear, and the pen and
the Desktop are easy to use.
Creative Use of Technology: While it’s a relatively
single-purpose device (write, draw, speak/record/play), that
purpose lends itself to tasks that are important in teaching
and learning. Students can take notes in class, teachers can create tutorials for students to use, and
anyone can search for specific information
they’ve saved and display or replay it.
Suitability for Use in a School
Environment: Students can take notes as
the teacher talks. The Livescribe Desktop
allows them to save, search, and play
back their notes and recordings on their
computers. It lets teachers and students
organize, manage, and export notes and
audio. Students can find the notes they
took on a specific topic and review them
before a test. Teachers can find the
tutorials they created on a topic. Even
administrators can keep meeting notes
to remind the staff of a decision that
was made and the details of it.
Teachers can prepare pages with
instructions: for example, how to solve
a complicated math problem. They
can draw the diagram or demonstrate
how to solve the problem as they
explain the process. Students can
review or replay the page, or a portion
of it, as many times as is necessary
for them to grasp the concept.
They can send or share notes and
recordings by exporting notes as
audio files or as pencasts. They can
embed pencasts on a blog, a Web site, Facebook, or the
Livescribe Community.
Overall Rating
This has such great potential to help solve challenges:
for students, in note taking; and for teachers, in creating
tutorials that include audio explanations and diagrams
for students, who can play back the whole tutorial or
part of it as needed.
Top Features
¦ The smartpen is priced low enough that
every student can have one.
¦ The basic features, capturing audio and
notes and saving them for replay, are
amazing.
¦ Even if students don’t use a computer,
this pen has advantages that will help
them.