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Inspiration and a Smart Pen

I finally figured out how to work my little interactive white board tablet in my room.  I used it on Friday and my kids loved it.  I like it to, and it was really my inspiration behind getting my Echo smart pen.  When trying to figure out how to use my interactive white board tablet (we will call it IWBT) I thought well I'll just google it and go from there.  Turns out... it isn't made anymore.  Never the less, I was able to figure out what I was doing, and it is great for my classroom.   It operates a lot like a Think Pad.  At any rate, I've seen several blog post referring to smart pens and LiveScribe on several blogs I subscribe to and I thought I would check it out.  I found an Echo pen in Best Buy and fell in love.  I was on a spending splurge today and decided this was going to go one of two ways.  I either was going to get an iPad, or a Smart Pen.  Well... I got the Smart Pen.

So I've been sitting at home and right now the new drivers are being done on my new pen and I can't wait to use it!  So I decided it would be a good idea to watch some videos because I really want to be able to use this for my students as soon as possible.  So if you don't know what a smart pen is for, I'm going to give some insight into what you can do with one, but for the rest I would recommend going to Livescribe's website, more importantly, their educators website.  

There are many things a Smart Pen can be used for,  and my ultimate goal is to do Pen Casts for my students.  I want to be able to do pen casts of problems that we are working on in class, and upload them to a site accessible to the students when they are at home.  Students can access the pen casts to use as study aids or homework aids.  I think this technology is phenomenal and can't wait to use it!  I'll get  a short pen cast rolling soon and put it up on my portfolio but also put it on my blog. 

For now, it is time to play!

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