1. Put Lesson Content Where It’s Needed

Pencasts allow Teachers to create mobile learning and distribute this content in a variety of ways – including via Facebook, email, embedded into a blog or sent directly to a parent.

Because of their versatility, Livescribe smartpens are being used by teachers in every subject, but math and science teachers have found them particularly useful, due to the step-by-step nature of those subjects, according to Holly De Leon, vice president of sales for its Livescribe’s K-12 division.

“A lot of math and science teachers are using it to be able to ensure students get all the parts (of a lesson),” she says. “If a student got parts one and two, and then was stumped on three and four, they can listen to just the portion they’re stumped on.” (Holly De Leon)

2. Monitor When the Pencast is Viewed

It’s all very well to create content to help the learning experience – but are students viewing the content – using it as part of their own study time? This is particuarly useful where students may be struggling with a specific subject – the teacher can monitor whether they are viewing Pencasts.

3. Gain an Insight into How Students Learn

For subjects like maths and science Pencasts give teachers the opportunity to gain an insight into how students are applying concepts.

Blumberg says that the advantage of Livescribe for students is that they can draw symbols while describing the process they’re going through, an important metacognitive process in learning math. And for teachers, they can see students’ metacognition in play.

“Kids can write down how they’re solving problems with sketching, with formulas, and talk through it at the same time,” she says. “Then the teacher can determine how fluid the child’s understanding is.”

These are three simple ways Pencasts can help teachers, students, and parents. If you have any stories on how you have used Pencasts – feel free to leave a comment – we’d love to hear from you.

1. Capture key learning areas in short Pencasts

Pencasts are an easy way to create, store, and share interactive tutorials. A Tutor can focus on key learning areas and easily create a library of content that can be shared with students. Pencasts used properly can become a significant marketing tool for your business as well. Building a library of Pencasts is an excellent way of differentiating your services from other Tutors.

2. Embed Pencast content into blogs, and key social networks

Once a Tutor has created content, it’s then quite easy to repurpose the content and use it in different ways. Briefly, I’d suggest at least the following:

(a)    Embed the Pencasts into blog posts on key topic areas. This is great if you’re communicating with your students on a regular basis.

(b)    Share into Moodle – Moodle’s huge in the APAC education space so being able to share specific tutorials or even longer content pieces that Moodle users can access repeatedly over time.

(c)    Push into Facebook – For Tutors working in the K-12 space, Facebook is a great channel for ongoing dialogue with students and parents.

3. Use the student’s pen to create revision content or penmail’s

If you’re working with a student who has a Livescribe Smartpen it’s logical that you can use their pen to create revision content that they can refer to later. In addition, it’s simple to create short penmail content for a parent with instructions as to what a student needs to focus on or what homework/revision should be completed.

What’s important with these ideas is that Pencasts are a highly interactive form of communication. A student doesn’t need to rely on just notes or just audio. The combination of the two is the real value that a Tutor can deliver.

How are you using Livescribe Pencasts? Have you thought about using your Livescribe Smartpen to share interactive content?

This is a US example of a teacher creating a Pencast around content that is going to be included in a future exam.

This is a point I make to a lot of teachers – use Pencasts to share knowledge once. If a key part of the curriculum can be turned into Livescribe content then create a 5-10 minute tutorial and then share this as a Pencast. Keep in mind Pencasts can be shared easily into Facebook, Moodle, WordPress etc – or simply to another computer that has Livescribe Desktop installed.

Having known about this for a while we were pretty excited to see the application released and I have to say it does live up to expectations.

From my perspective, being able to have Pencasts on my iPhone is quite handy as I can quickly access and/or share content on an instant, as needed basis. This is particularly handy in a business context where I can access content from previous meetings without needing to worry about which book I wrote in (I use multiple books simultaneously). The other feature I like is that I can access pencasts when talking one on one with people – no need to interrupt the flow of our conversation – just boot up Pencasts and go to the session I want to share.

One feature I wasn’t so sure about but have come to realise the hidden value of is that Pencasts allows me to browse public pencasts. As I noted earlier today, our new Smartpen Facebook store includes content and special offers aimed at our student, parent, and teacher communities. Now I’ve got the additional option of searching public Pencasts that are focused on education (or other industries for that matter) and can quickly review this content and then share it if I feel it will help the Australian Livescribe community.

The release of the free Pencast player enables you to access a digital copy of your synchronized notes and audio as pencasts from anywhere. Now notes and audio from critical meetings or lectures are portable and playable when you need them.

This is a major step forward for Livescribe’s mobile computing platform – we first got wind of this earlier this year when Jim Marggraff visited Australia. Since that visit we’ve had many hundreds of customers asking us about when, what, and how.

Instant Access to Synchronised Notes and Audio Any time, Anywhere with Livescribe

“Pencast Player lets consumers access their written and spoken information on the go with their favourite Apple products.”

Byron Connell, Livescribe chief marketing officer

Pricing and Availability

Pencast Player is available immediately, free-of-charge via the iTunes App store. The application works with all iPad devices with iOS 3.2 or higher and all iPhone and iTouch devices with iOS 4.0 or higher and requires iTunes 9.2 or higher.

We’ll be road testing this new application this week in Sydney – stay tuned for our reviews.

This is shaping up as yet another major development for Livescribe in 2010 – the breakthrough year

Like podcasts, videos, tweets and digital photos, Pencasts are a new online communication tool, allowing anyone to digitally share notes, ideas, drawings and conversations from pen and paper online for the first time.

We’re talking to a number of Australian schools about how they are using Pencasts and in the coming weeks I hope to be able to share some examples with everyone.

In the meantime, here’s a great list of Pencasts from a Professor of Mechanics at Purdue University in the US.

With the recent addition of pencasts to the functionality in the Livescribe Smartpen and the existing capability to share Livescribe content into Facebook,  Livescribe is becoming an important tool for educators and students alike.

There are many ways Livescribe can aide borderless social learning. For example, students studying say Japanese in Australian schools might create Pencasts of a lesson tutorial and using Facebook could have this assessed by their peers in Kobe – this is a two way street – so students in Kobe can practice articulating English words and share these Pencasts with Australian students who can then provide feedback and help.

I can see schools encouraging students to create borderless study groups so that a subject or lesson topic could be worked on by students located around the world. So we take this idea of Randy Pausch from Carnegie Mellon breaking down faculty barriers and apply that on an international scale – why should learning be limited to known borders?

If you work in education or are interested in this subject – we’d love to hear from you

Pencasts is a tool that allows a user to embed handwritten notes and audio recordings as Flash videos, called “pencasts,” within any Web site or blog – much like we can embed YouTube videos or Flickr photos.

The Livescribe site has more information about Pencasts – this is a good place to start.

We’ll be tinkering with this new feature in the coming weeks. If you do create a Pencast that you’d like to share – leave a comment or send us an email and we’ll happily put it here on the blog