Back in September, I stumbled across a New York Times article detailing the ways that students in Brian Licata's middle school math class in Staten Island, New York, were using Livescribe pens (www.livescribe.com). Livescribe pens are oversized pens packed with a camera and recording tools that—when paired with special notebooks filled with paper covered in a barely visible pattern of dots—track every stroke of a user's handwriting and couple it with time-synced audio of whatever words are spoken as the user writes.
My professional wheels started turning when I read this segment from the Times article, describing how one student in Licata's class used her digital pen to complete a challenging homework assignment:
To refresh her memory, Dervishaj pulled out her math notebook. But her class notes were not great: She had copied several sample problems but hadn't written a clear explanation of how exponents work. She didn't need to. Dervishaj's entire grade 7 math class has been outfitted with "smart pens" made by Livescribe, a start-up based in Oakland, California. The pens perform an interesting trick: When Dervishaj and her classmates write in their notebooks, the pen records audio of whatever is going on around it and links the audio to the handwritten words. If her written notes are inadequate, she can tap the pen on a sentence or word, and the pen plays what the teacher was saying at that precise point.
Imagine your students clicking at any point on any sheet of their class notes to listen to an audio recording of the lesson at that exact moment. To middle school parents and teachers charged with supporting notoriously bad note takers, that would be a digital dream. Even if a student only jots down a keyword connected to what the teacher is saying at that moment, when the student taps that word, the pen replays the fuller explanation. Each stroke of handwriting essentially becomes a "digital placeholder," making it possible to return to important sections of the audio recording. Students who write down important concepts can easily revisit their teachers' explanations even if they can't keep up with everything their teacher is saying.
Creative Possibilities
Livescribe pens can do more than improve note-taking practices, however. I've seen teachers use these digital pens creatively in other ways.
Create remediation tutorials. One of my favorite features of Livescribe pens is that anything you write in the accompanying notebook can be easily uploaded to the Internet as a "pencast" (a digital replay of what you wrote paired with the audio recording synced to that segment of writing). That makes crafting short remediation tutorials a lot easier—a lesson learned by Karen Beazlie, the math teacher on my learning team who recently used my Livescribe pen and notebook to create a pencast on solving percentages. (See www.livescribe.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/LDApp.woa/wa/MLSOverviewPage?sid=MMPTbSKP5pH7.)
Provide enrichment opportunities. Although providing remediation has become second nature for most teachers, creating extensions for advanced students can be challenging. Middle school technology teacher Mike Kaechele finds that creating enrichment opportunities for students who have already mastered classroom content is easier when he shares this technology. Kaechele just hands students his Livescribe pen and notebook and sends them into the hallway to design tutorials. He later uses those tutorials to teach required concepts to their peers. (See www.livescribe.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/LDApp.woa/wa/MLSOverviewPage?sid=rLfWR675S5B5 for a sample tutorial on longitudinal waves that two of Kaechele's students designed.)
Make a master copy of classroom lessons and notes. Most teachers will tell you that getting students caught up after they've been absent or before a big test isn't easy. We struggle to find the time to meet with students who need our help. It is also hard to put our hands on the materials we used to teach concepts in class at an earlier date. Have a responsible student with good handwriting use your Livescribe pen and notebook during class every day, though, and you'll have a master copy of lessons and notes that you can post to the web for absent students to explore from home. Students who don't have Internet access at home can borrow your digital pen and notebook to interact with the same content.
Hook digitally hesitant teachers. Let's face it—despite years of technology integration and professional development efforts, a ton of teachers still struggle with new digital tools. For those teachers, pens like Livescribe are a great introduction to digital possibilities. Although Livescribe products enable all kinds of technologically progressive behaviors—like creating and storing digital tutorials online and fostering student-driven enrichment opportunities—in their simplest form, they are nothing more than pens and notebooks, tools that traditional teachers are comfortable with.
Affordable and Explorable
Perhaps the best news for cash-strapped schools is that Livescribe pens and notebooks are affordable, starting at $129 for a spiral notebook and a pen capable of holding 200 hours of classroom recordings. The Livescribe website offers discounts for K–12 educators and a wide selection of refurbished pens selling for as little as $79. And although interested users can print Livescribe-ready paper from their own printers, three-subject Livescribe spiral notebooks— available from online retailers like Amazon—sell for about $5.
That makes these devices one of the most affordable digital products on the market today. For the cost of one interactive whiteboard—also frequently used to record lessons and create tutorials— schools could purchase almost a dozen Livescribe pens and notebooks.
In the end, Livescribe pens are worth exploring because they put affordable digital tools directly into the hands of students. That should be the primary goal of any educator working to redefine teaching and learning in the 21st century.
