Calling all Apple fans! Livescribe’s Pencast Player app for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch is now available for free in iTunes. The app enables you to access a digital copy of your synchronized notes and audio as pencasts from anywhere. Now notes and audio from critical meetings or lectures are portable and playable right when you need them.

Registered customers with a MyLivescribe account can access any pencasts uploaded to their 500 MB of personal storage from their favorite Apple device. Pencast Player also lets anyone access pencasts posted on Livescribe’s online community, regardless of whether you have a smartpen or MyLivescribe account.

The application works with all iPad devices with iOS 3.2 or higher and all iPhone and iTouch devices with iOS 4.0 or higher and requires iTunes 9.2 or higher.

To download the app visit the iTunes store. Let us know what you think on Facebook and Twitter!

Exciting news for Livescribe today! Overcoming the current state of the economy, we just secured $39 million in our Series C financing round, bringing the total investment in our company to approximately $100 million since our launch in 2007.
 
Crosslink Capital led the round, joined by Scale Venture Partners, as well as other investments from Qualcomm, TransLink Capital, Presidio Ventures, Keating Capital, and existing investors VantagePoint Venture Partners, Lionhart, and Aeris Capital.
 
This infusion of funding will be used to expand into new markets, as well as continue to advance the company’s technology platform so we can deliver on our commitment to enhance our communication and collaboration tools. This includes software developed by recently acquired Zoomii Learning, Inc., which allows consumers, educators and business professionals to share notes and audio direct from their notebook as an interactive Pencast PDF and send via email or integrate directly with online applications and services including Google Docs and Facebook.
 
Stay tuned for more information on our communication and collaboration tools coming later this fall!

Livescribe recently received a 600 Pulse smartpen order from the Corsicana Independent School District in Texas and since they have an interesting plan for their smartpens, we wanted to share their story with you.

The Corsicana Independent School District is planning to use Pulse smartpens to combat the district’s high dropout rates, especially in minority groups. With the national high school dropout rate at roughly 9 percent – and 21 percent for Hispanics – it’s no wonder this eight-school district considers credit recovery a top priority.

In case you’re unfamiliar, credit recovery options allow students to retake courses they haven’t passed, though they’ve met the minimum class time requirement. It’s a pretty common practice to prevent dropouts among high school students since credit recovery lets students finish coursework on a flexible schedule (generally speaking) to earn graduation credits. Corsicana is revamping its entire credit recovery program using the Pulse smartpen.

Marti Shaner, Corsicana’s assistant superintendent, had the idea to assign smartpens to the district’s best teachers in various subject areas. Shaner notes, “Pulse is the best piece technology for the money I’ve seen … it offers more uses than I can think of.” Teachers assigned smartpens are asked to record their lessons and upload the resulting pencasts to the district website, which is being completely redesigned for this program. All lessons with be indexed by subject, grade and state standard, so credit recovery students can easily access teacher instruction. Sometimes just having something explained differently can make all the difference, which is why having multiple teachers record lessons is so helpful! Students can watch the pencast lessons at their own pace, as many times as they need to.

We think this is a very innovative way to address an important issue that is facing school districts across the country and we’ll be keeping a close eye on Corsicana’s program as it develops. Stay tuned for future updates and congratulations to the Corsicana Independent School District for such a great program idea!

SOURCE: National Center for Education Statistics