"Sitting up & taking notes":

Using the iPad for reading and writing

Johan GeertsemaUniversity Scholars Programme

January 2012

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Outline1. Context

• Teaching

• iPad, including potential limitations

• Apps, main apps used

2. iAnnotate PDF main focus:

•marking up course readings; providing feedback on student work

•functionality: examples

•problems & student feedback: inferences

•summary of advantages

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Teaching context• Used the iPad as an integral part of teaching a

small research seminar in the University Scholars Programme (undergraduate)

• As instructor used it in mainly two ways—both relating to PDF documents:

1. Marking up and annotating course readings

2. Marking up student work: feedback & grading

• Small class: ca. 10 students (who did not use iPads)

• Multiple drafts; revision is key3

iPadSkeptics might ask (certainly have asked):

Just a big smartphone (albeit one that can’t make calls …)?

Entertainment mainly? Video, games, surfing

Can it be a replacement for a laptop?

They might then ask:

How can I use the iPad in my teaching?

What actual benefits might it have?

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Potential limitations1. Arranging all files into folders as on Mac or PC not

possible

✳ But search function works well

2. Non-tactile keyboard: some find this annoying, and it seems true that typing is slower/more awkward

3. Though wireless keyboard is possible, not ideal due to touchscreen interface

✳ Lack of mouse: the whole point of the iPad interface is to use one’s fingers, but that makes an external keyboard awkward

✳ Because of its small size and touchscreen interface iPad is best used for more limited kinds of writing, but does this very well.

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AppsOf course, there are zillions (well, thousands) of brilliant “apps” available in Apple’s App Store.

Fascinating things one could do with the iPad, also in the classroom.

Modelling, virtual reality: very many high-tech things.

But: I am not really a very high-tech person—rather, an ordinary educator using the iPad in class as part of CIT’s Loan Scheme

Main purpose for which I have used iPad is a very basic one: taking notes, in particular annotating texts

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Main apps usedSome note taking apps:

iAnnotate: for reading and annotating PDF files (my focus)

Evernote and Soundnote: for creating and organizing notes

Kobo and Bluefire Reader: for reading and annotating eBooks—DRM-protected ePub files

While note taking is a very basic function, it is one all academic readers and writers—whether students or faculty—engage in regularly: & of course very valuable pedagogically.

Research: documentation, highlighting key words, etc.

Feedback to students7

Evernote

• creating text notes; clipping web pages with desktop version; taking photos

• excellent organizational functionality: tagging and notebooks, e.g. for individual research projects, classes taught

• allows syncing with the company’s servers—‘in the cloud’—and thus across devices: for backing up + having identical sets of notes on iPad, iPhone, desktops

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SoundNote

• less customizable as far as organizing notes is concerned, but excellent for taking notes of live presentations

• data file keeps the audio in sync with the text you have typed so it knows where within the audio to jump to when you click a word or drawing during playback

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Kobo & Bluefire ReaderKobo

• Very much social-media oriented• Good built-in dictionary• Most recent versions allow for syncing and

backing up of notes, bookmarks, highlighting through cloud to other iOS devices

• No search function!

Bluefire Reader• Decent search function• No syncing of notes!

•Apple’s iBooks and Amazon’s Kindle: books not readily accessible / for sale in Singapore

•Skoob: Singtel’s recent eBookstore & app12

iAnnotate PDF:Course readings

Great advantage of having course readings in PDF is that the text is searchable. Many / most journals available electronically

in searchable PDF.Where that’s not the case, or when the

reading comes from a book, I have a scanned version of it that I ‘OCR’ on desktop computer.

Acrobat’s Optical Character Recognition function (Document --> OCR Text Recognition) renders the text searchable.

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iAnnotate PDF:Grading / feedback

Students:• upload submissions (PDF or Word or slides) to

IVLE Workbin• 5-20 pp. long: research proposals, presentations,

different drafts of papersInstructor:• downloads zip file to desktop• syncs files to iPad with Dropbox• or downloads them directly from IVLE using CIT’s

app• opens files in iAnnotate and proceeds to read and

mark them up• emails individual files back to students

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iAnnotate PDF:Functionality

• Reading and searching through PDF files, but especially (of course) annotating them

• Finger-based interface makes annotating a breeze• Same main kinds of annotation as in Acrobat:

• highlighting text and then commenting• using the typewriter function for more immediately

visible in-text annotations• drawing with the finger

• flexibility with customizing toolbars and page sizes• search function, both within and across documents

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Annotated pages

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Highlighting text and then commenting

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Typewriter function

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Drawing

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Problems using the app

• Not many problems: very stable

• Students highlighted some issues (will get to them)

• But: larger and / or more graphics-intensive files, in particular some scanned files, can take too long to load when e.g. moving from one page to another or zooming in and out.

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Loading …

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Loading …

• Sometimes it can take 10 seconds or even longer; this is the one area where I have found using iAnnotate, and the iPad more generally, deficient when reading PDFs.

• Workaround: reduce document seize, and/or OCR.

• iPad is not usable in classroom situations in the case of scanned files that exhibit this behaviour, since it simply takes too long to turn pages.

• Hopefully iPad 3 will have more internal memory and a faster processor?

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Student FeedbackQuestion

8. Did you find my COMMENTS on your writing helpful? Please elaborate on: (a) the quality and quantity of comments you received (b) the format in which you received them (PDF)

Caveats:

Small seminar-style class

Have run survey once only

I.e. these results are statistically not significant, but even so I have found them useful.

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Student FeedbackResponses (1)

I find the comments REALLY helpful…. The PDF format is good because it saves the student the hassle to print it out or to rush to school to submit the paper. However there might be technical glitches here and there. 11/20/2011 12:27 AM

Certainly! The comments I received really helped me progress to the next stage of the research process and I do find the format neat. One grouse I have with this format is that I can't print it out (as I prefer to have a hard copy with me as I edit instead of having to switch between windows on my laptop). So in summary, the format was really neat (at least it's completely legible …) but I would have preferred to be able to print them without having too much hassle copying and pasting the comments. 11/11/2011 2:40 PM

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Student FeedbackResponses (2)

Yes I do find your comments very helpful…. a. the quality of comments I received so far is critical enough. …. b. I sometimes struggle[d] clicking the comments one by one, especially if I need to print it from a PC. I must open all the comments in the .pdf file then print as .pdf from my mac, then send to my email to be printed from a PC computer. However, it's nice to receive the last commented conference paper draft because the comments are put as endnotes. I am not sure if this is very subjective, but the latter is much more friendly to me! 11/10/2011 12:49

Yes, I would have preferred it printed out with pen marks but that's because I'm a traditional person and have a small screen so I can't see everything. 11/9/2011 11:41 PM

I think the comments on the papers were very helpful in pointing out mistakes and errors in my paper that I would have otherwise not noticed. The PDF format was also very easy to read and convenient 11/9/2011 9:53 PM

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Inferences

Students note convenience and user friendliness, though there may be technical issues.

Printing is a key issue for some: want to work on paper, yet didn’t know how they could print the file with all the comments included.

Indication that some prefer separately listed comments.

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Therefore …

I will this semester do two or three things differently:

1. Use iAnnotate’s “Flattening” function when returning papers. It prints all annotations by page and line number with hyperlinks at the end of the document.

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Flattening a file

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Flattened notes

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or:

2.Provide students with a separate file, generated by iAnnotate, that lists comments

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or:

2.Provide them with a separate file that lists comments

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Notes

• Notes extracted

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and …3. Most importantly, brief students better, e.g.

how to view the documents (and/or print them)

• I simply assumed students would know how to open and print marked-up PDF documents—and access the annotations: invalid assumption

4. Would be really great if students could use the app on the iPad for their own pack of course readings, and for accessing my comments on their assignments: CIT??

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Finally: some main advantages

• Student work in PDF: document not editable

In my view, students must decide how to use my feedback: providing feedback in a Word document has always seemed to me to be too interventionist, coming too close to making revisions that should properly speaking be carried out by the student. (This is especially the case where students submit multiple drafts, as they do for my classes: I teaching writing and critical thinking in the USP.)

• Searchability: finding passages with key terms very convenient

• Mobility: on the bus, the plane, in a compact device

• ‘Centrality’: really useful to take iPad into classroom rather than stacks of paper—all notes on all class readings are centrally available, and all student papers / projects

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Thank you!

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