Livescribe Pulse Pen – First Test

Follow-up to Livescribe Pulse Pen – Installation from Mike Allen's blog

The Pulse pen comes with an A5 starter notebook of 50 sheets, which I used for my first test. I simply wrote a page of stuff off the top of my head, recording on the pen’ s microphone. The result is part a . After I stopped recording, I started again just to add a little more at the end, giving part b .

I learned several things straight off.

1. With the chosen audio sensitivity (“automatic”) the pen picks up the scratching sound it makes when writing on the paper. Obviously this would be very distracting! However the pen comes with a set of earphones-cum-microphones which can be hung round the neck, over-riding the built-in microphone, which may solve the problem, and I’ll try using those next time.
2. I need to learn how to combine several audio segments into one upload, if this is possible.
3. In my initial, off-the-cuff, ramblings, I tended to simply read out what I was writing, sometimes slowing down to Robert-Peston-like speed and monotonicity. This obviously will not be good enough, I need to be much more like I would be when using a blackboard, i.e. speaking at the right time, at the right pace, and staying quiet when this is appropriate. Practice, hopefully, will improve this!
4. I need to keep an eye on the legibility of the replayed pencast. I intend to use A4, not A5, in the lectures, and to employ normal sized handwriting if possible (notwithstanding the fact that the smartpen itself is a very chunky thing, about 15 mm diameter!). But how much control do our Flash players give over the size of the image? I haven’t yet discovered how to fit the width (rather than the height) to my screen dimensions.

Michael Allen : 04 Aug 2010 15:22 |  Tags: Livescribe |  Comments (0) |  Trackbacks (1) |  Report a problem