Support for the capture of student notes is also important. We made a conscious decision in all prototypes not to provide a keyboard interface for note-taking. Despite the advantages of keyboard input, such as faster input rates, increased legibility and easier search capabilities, we did not want the distraction in class of a cacophony of keyclicks. All note-taking, therefore, was done either with traditional pen and paper or with pen-based computing technology.
We also used ClassPad on pen-based PCs, resulting in the electronic student notebook. This version of the electronic notebook was suitable for both the verbatim and highlighting modes of note-taking, but it was designed with the highlighting student note-taker in mind. The student would see the same information that the teacher put up on the electronic whiteboard and could annotate it with personal comments to make certain points clearer, as shown on the left side of Figure 1. Students could flip though the class notes the same way the lecturer did (though the units were not synchronized so the student was free to browse the slides at their own pace) and write whatever notes they wanted on top of the slides. The navigation between slides and student annotations were logged by ClassPad.
We also investigated the use of smaller PDA-style electronic notebooks, such as the Apple MessagePad. The MessagePad's resolution made it infeasible to use the same philosophy of note-taking used in ClassPad. The prepared slide images would not have been legible, and there would have been little space on the screen for taking notes. Instead, the MessagePad note-taking application, shown on the right side of Figure 1, provides an outline of the lecture. A time-stamped note (called a ``slide'' in the actual interface in Figure 1), is associated with each entry in the outline. Touching the entry with the pen causes a note to appear (there is one note available per outline entry) and the student then writes in the note. This outline note-taker logs the first time each note was revealed.
Future Computing Environments