This week I have been discussing a number of tools and perspectives related to taking notes. I spend plenty of time in college scribbling notes feverishly into a variety of notebooks, and over time slowly developed more amounts of organization. Nowadays there are some high tech ways to get to that sort of organized collection of information. So, instead of a Bic pen and a college ruled notebook, here are a few alternatives….
One of the more amazing pieces of tech that you can use is the Livescribe pen. This tool, which when coupled with their proprietary paper (it comes with incredibly tiny printed points on the paper) you can write notes in about the same manner as you may have with the old school gear… OF course, while taking these notes, the pen is: 1. Recording audio, and 2, it ‘records’ exactly what you write (the pen is equipped with an infrared camera at the pen tip literally filming what you write).
When you finish taking the notes you can dock the pen with your PC or Mac and import your notes (they come with the audio). One of the amazing things about this tool is that when reviewing the notes, the audio is directly tied to whatever what written at the same time. For college students this may be a deal maker…
If you don’t want to invest your money into the Livescribe pen (<$150.00…), you can pick up an iPhone app to record lectures, or to generally use smartphone as a digital recorder. The QuickVoice app is amongst the top of the list of these apps. With the Pro version you can actually automatically have the app transcribe your voice into a formatted email…you can actually send emails with almost nothing but your voice…
For the iPad users out there, here is a list covering some of the better note taking apps
The Best Note-Taking Apps for the iPad
One of the more interesting apps shown is WritePad for iPad 4.5; this app has handwriting recognition to the degree that your iPad can be turned into an Apple Newton (i.e. a good thing).
