Lacata uses pencasts to record supplementary lectures for his students, showing on paper how to work through a math problem while he explains his steps. Later, you can play your notes back as a pencast - a little movie where the notes gradually appear in sync with the audio. Instead of jotting down notes or recording your voice during a brainstorming session, you can do both. The Echo's pencast function makes mind-mapping with the pen extremely useful. Instead of notes, you've recorded a mind-map. When Lacata's students take notes, "the pen alters their writing style: Instead of verbatim snippets of Lacata’s instructions, they can write 'key words' - essentially little handwritten tags that let them quickly locate a crucial moment in the audio stream." Essentially, it offloads the raw-data–recording component of note-taking to the audio stream, while placing the tagging, indexing, thinking and questioning components firmly within script. As Thompson notes, “the pen is based on an age-old classroom technique that requires no learning curve: pen-and-paper writing.” But while audio recording has been used for some time (not without controversy) to tape lectures and meetings, it changes with the use of the smartpen. In the classroom, the smartpen is a curious mix of the traditional and the high-tech. In The New York Times, Wired columnist Clive Thompson profiled Brian Lacata, an Oakland math teacher whose students all use Livescribe pens in his class.
Recording Speeches and Classroom Lectures It’s particularly useful to export written notes to online note–management applications that can handle PDFs like Evernote for remote storage. There the Livescribe Desktop application (on Mac or Windows) can print your written notes to a PDF file or export your audio for archiving or editing. You can play back recordings using the pen’s built-in speaker, or by uploading the pencast to your computer.