So I bought one of those Livescribe pens at the beginning of the school year in hope of being able to share writing and voice from my lessons online. I’ve tried a few other ways to do this, and they all had problems or were just plain clunky. Mimeo didn’t save sound and compressed motion into fast videos. The interwrite pad didn’t save sound either, and I felt had poor resolution. I saved some lessons as video clips with my document camera plugged into my MacBook, but the files were huge.

Livescribe seemed to solve most of these issues. I could write in a (special) notebook, and have whatever I write stored in the pen, along with my voice. What’s more, the audio is perfectly synced to the writing, and could all could be shared online in small, easy to post flash videos. Sounded good.

A little too good to be true. I can’t complain a lot about the company or the technology, I was just a bit early to the party. The software only worked on PCs in the fall when I first got it, and the port I needed to use to post the clips to their site was blocked by my school district. Of course. I have no PC at home, and when the Mac software did come out in the late fall, it didn’t support the video upload feature. Great.

Over the last month or so, updates to the mac software seems to have solved the problems, so I am back messing with it in hopes of using it next year.

So let’s run a little test… here is a fraction intro lesson from a few months back… Of course, I still have to post it from home.