Last year, I bought a Livescribe Echo Smart Pen with the hope that it would be useful in teaching. Well, here the result of my first attempt to use it “in anger”. I used the pen to write out a solution to one of the problems from my module EGLM03 Modern Control Systems while recording a narrative of what I was doing. The pen recorded the pen movement on the special notepaper and matched the movement to the audio. I then uploaded the recording to the Livescribe Community where it is made available as an embeddable flash movie.

Here’s the result:

Some nice features about this presentation: you can show, hide or partially hide the completed page; you can move through the presentation like it’s a video; and you can click on the page to go to the point in the drawing and the recording closest to the virtual pen’s position on the virtual page when that part of the image was drawn. With the real pen and the notebook,  you can also playback what was being said when you wrote a note and this would be great for students using the pen in lectures!