Accessible Pen and Paper?

I first heard of Live­scribe from an announce­ment of their upcom­ing ‘smart­pen’ and noted that a for­mer pro­fes­sor, Andy Van Schaack, PhD was involved in the project. A few weeks ago, I was able to attend a pre­sen­ta­tion from Dr. Van Schaack and learned a lit­tle more about the project. I was espe­cially inter­ested in the note on the pre­sen­ta­tion flyer that said he would “present his cur­rent NSF–funded study on the use of the smart­pen to sup­port blind col­lege stu­dents in sci­ence, engi­neer­ing and math.”

He started off with pro­mo­tional infor­ma­tion about how the Live­scribe sys­tem is a new com­put­ing plat­form with a great team behind it. By all accounts it appears to be a laud­able effort in the arena of com­pa­ra­ble smart pen tech­nolo­gies. It works by record­ing audio while using the pen on spe­cial paper. You can then go back to any point in your notes, tap on the page and lis­ten to the cor­re­spond­ing audio. Your notes also become search­able and shareable.

Then he addressed how the project would help make con­tent acces­si­ble for stu­dents who are blind. Cur­rently, a stu­dent who is blind study­ing in a field that requires the use of graphs or dia­grams would need a tech­nol­ogy toolkit such as a lap­top paired with a not inex­pen­sive tac­tile talk­ing tablet. The price point low­ers sig­nif­i­cantly as stu­dents are able to use the Live­scribe pen with the more afford­able Sewell raised-line draw­ing kit. This com­bi­na­tion of tech­nol­ogy allows the stu­dents to draw and anno­tate a graph with the abil­ity to ref­er­ence the graphic later and access what­ever audio was recorded at the time.

Addi­tional Resources

(Update) Andy sent me a cou­ple of addi­tional links to share:

Reply

or

Archives and Categories

Subscribe subscribe

About

Twitter