[Athen] Livescribe and note taking

[Forman, Tracey]

We are not currently loaning smart pens to our students.   While I know the Smart Pen technology can be a great tool, I see pens and notebooks as personal items and not something we need to provide to the students as an accommodation.

When I attended a LiveScribe workshop at AHEAD a few years back I could see the management of loan program on a large scale would be challenging. To use the full features of the pen it requires that the pen be registered to a specific person and e-mail address.   At that time it appeared you had to contact Livescribe tech support to have them manually reset the pen account each time the pen was assigned to another user.   (If this has changed, please let me know.)

However our department does have 4 Livescribe pens of differing models (Pulse, Echo, Sky) in the office that we use to do demonstrations and trainings.  We have a few staff members that will help students set up their own smart pens, but we are not providing the pens, notebooks or other supplies to the students as an accommodation.  Setting up the Sky model pen was initially a little challenging because the Wi-Fi  that the pen supports initially did not work with the enterprise Wi-Fi login system used on our campus.  Thankfully that was fixed in one of the recent firmware updates and we have been able to help students set-up the wi-fi sync to their Evernote software if needed.

For students that cannot afford their own recorder (or the Smart Pen) we do have an inventory of digital voice recorders that we loan on a semester basis.  For now we currently see the pen as a preferred accommodation/personal device for notetaking/recording.  The recording and notetaking accommodation can still be met in many other ways.  We still coordinate volunteer notetakers, loan digital voice recorders and train students on some other recording/notetaking tools (computer software, tablet apps).

I'm not saying we would never loan a smart pen, but this is not something we are doing in regular practice right now or anticipate offering on a scale that you are suggesting.

I'm attaching our notetaking technology handout that we use to train and discuss options for notetaking with a variety  of recording tools.  We are in the process of updating it for the spring and plan to include some of the suggested tablet apps as well.


--
Tracey Forman
Disability Services
Texas A&M University
979.845.1637
traceyf at disability.tamu.edu<mailto:traceyf at disability.tamu.edu>

From: athen-list [mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman13.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Norwich, Lorraine S
Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2014 11:33 AM
To: athen-list at u.washington.edu
Cc: Alternate Media digest
Subject: [Athen] Livescribe and note taking

We are in the process of doing a pilot study on live scribe pens and implementing them at BU.  Any feedback or information you can share with us on how you loan the pens if you use them or if you still use note takers, would be very helpful.

Thanks

Lorraine

Lorraine S. Norwich, BSME, MSIS
Assistant Director of Disability Services
Boston University
19 Deerfield Street, 2nd Floor
Boston, MA 02215
lnorwich at bu.edu<mailto:lnorwich at bu.edu> (email)
617-353-3658 (vox)
617-353-9646 (fax)
www.bu.edu/disability<http://www.bu.edu/disability> (website)

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