SMART Pen

SMART Pens by Livescribe Pens are oversized pens packed with a camera, and recording tools.When paired with special notebooks filled with paper covered in a barely visible pattern of dots, the SMART Pen tracks every stroke of a user's handwriting and couples it with time-synced audio of whatever words are spoken as the user writes.

"A Pen that Remembers" by William M. Ferriter is a short article that describes the SMART Pen and explores its creative possibilities in educational settings.

                                           SMART Pen Demo
                                          

The SMART Pen in my Instruction 

I would use the SMART Pen in my instruction in two ways.  First of all, I would use it to create remediation tutorials, and secondly, I would use it to create a master copy all my classroom lessons and notes.  In the first instance, anything written by the SMART Pen can be uploaded to the Internet as a "pencast".  It would be quite easy to use this feature to create accessible remediation segments.  The master copy of lessons would be ideal for helping catch students up who have been absent or late.  Having a reliable student take notes and then posting them to an accessible web location would make this ordinarily difficult task of "catching students up" an easy one.

Advantages and Limitations of the SMART Pen

 Advantages:

•  relatively inexpensive - starting at about $100 for a spiral notebook and a pen capable of holding 200 hours of classroom instruction
• pens are actually be in the hands of students at all times and the technology is not being controlled by the instructor
• SMART Pens can create a quickly accessible 'record' of all events in a class

Limitations:

• privacy concerns in that everything said in a class is recorded by the SMART pen
• the necessity of having to purchase proprietary notebooks to successfully use the pen at a more expensive price then regular notebooks
• rechargeable batteries running out at an inopportune time