Guarantee your child’s educational success for less than $200!

On Feb 2, 2009, I bought the Livescribe Pulse pen at Target for $159.74.  That one purchase changed my life.

Basically the Pulse pen does two things: It allows me to write in a special notebook (more on that later) while, at the same time, recording sound through my pen – it then links the sound to my writing.  So if I am having a conversation with you and you say something I don’t want to forget, I can put an * on the paper and later, after our conversation has concluded, I can touch the paper at that point (at the *) and the recording of our conversation will pick up where you said what I didn’t want to forget.

Imagine a student taking notes in class.  He is listening to his math professor work through a problem.  The student could bring a voice recorder to class and tape the lecture.  He could also take notes.  But what if his notes were linked to the voice recording so that as he copied down the problem in his notebook, what he was writing was linked to what the teacher was saying at that moment.  Then when the student wanted to review he could simply touch the page at the point where he wanted to hear the explanation of a particular problem or portion of a problem and listen to it again.

Now imagine that the student’s notebook and recording were automatically copied to his computer so that he could look at a computer image of his notebook page, touch the page with his mouse, and hear the lecture through his computer speakers.

This is all possible with the Livescribe Pulse pen.

I was looking for a transcription service for my business. I am a communications consultant and take lots of notes.  I spend a lot of time typing them up.  I wasn’t sure, however, that I wanted to risk the confidentiality of my client conversations by hiring a transcription service.  Besides, sometimes I can’t read what I wrote or remember why I wrote what I did.  None of the digital pens I researched seemed like they had arrived, and then I found the Pulse pen.  It sounded too good to be true, but for my business it was easy to justify a $159.74 purchase to find out just how good it was.

What you need to know:

• The pen uses special ink refills that are easy to swap out – about $2.00-2.50 a refill with tax and shipping.
• The paper it uses is like a large map and the pen like a GPS; the special notebooks are all numbered, so when I write on Page 27 of Notebook #3, the pen knows that and when the page is recreated on my computer it shows up as Page 27 of Notebook #3.
• The spiral notebooks I use are about $5.00 each for 200 pages (100 double-sided).
• The pen is available online at www.livescribe.com, through eBay or other online stores; it is available in some brick and mortar stores as well.
• There is a newer version of the pen – the Echo – that I know very little about.

What you need to consider:

• If your child is going to let his teachers know he is using a recording device then you will have to see if your district, school, or particular teachers have policies about this usage.
• I do a lot of work with educators and have warned principals to watch out for “fat” pens – they may be being recorded without knowing it and need to be careful what they say.  The same would hold true for teachers and you can imagine why some of them might object to being recorded on a daily basis – I don’t think they should or even should be allowed to object, but you can imagine why they might.
• I have been told that in the State of Ohio it is legal to record a conversation as long as one party to the conversation knows that it is being recorded – that is, you can’t eavesdrop electronically where no one in the conversation knows it is being recorded.  You would need to check out your own state laws.
• I always alert prospects and clients to my recording pen because it isn’t worth the loss of trust if they were to find out later.  I also download the recordings and delete them from my pen on a daily basis to safeguard the conversations in case the pen were lost.  A student would want to leave the recordings on the pen so he could use them with the notebook during review sessions later in the course.

So now when I try to read my notes and can’t figure out what they mean, or when I have forgotten the context of a word or phrase, I simply listen to that part of the conversation again and can easily reconstruct what I have written and why.

Obviously neither I nor anyone else can guarantee your child’s educational success for any amount of money, but for less than $200 you can make an investment that pays both immediate and long-term dividends as your child is less focused on taking down every word that is said and more focused on learning and taking notes that will be helpful for later review.

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