As many high school students, teachers, and parents alike know, SAT and ACT test dates are fast approaching, and it can be tough to find the time to study amidst homework, sports practices, and other extracurricular activities.  However, new edtech tools can help students study smarter so they feel more confident as test dates approach. We’ve created a roundup of our favorite study tools for high school students preparing for standardized tests.

1. Livescribe smartpen - The smartpen captures everything students hear, draw and write during class, allowing them to simply tap the ink on their notebooks to play back everything recorded at that moment. The smartpen then transfers all their notes and recordings to a desktop, laptop, tablet, or other mobile device, so students can study anytime, anywhere. They can search for key phrases and create custom digital notebooks to better organize their test prep notes. Smartpens are useful study tools for creating interactive vocabulary flash cards, practicing essay prompts, and recording tutoring sessions when preparing for the upcoming standardized tests.
2. Testive - Testive builds products that improve testing and test preparation, including SAT Habit, which helps students with practice tests and improves their overall SAT score. Testive’s algorithms can predict outcomes three times faster, automatically generate strength and weakness assessments, and link content to interventions. Testive’s research has shown that students who used SAT Habit for at least 30 days saw an average projected score increase of 70 points.
3. Grockit - Grockit’s SAT and ACT prep programs are designed to amplify a student’s study time, with social games and algorithms that optimize students’ experiences. Grockit programs provide performance reports for students, parents, and teachers. The content developed by PhDs, and programs are specifically tailored for each student. Students can also work with other educators and peers on the social media site.
4. InstaEDU - InstaEDU makes personal tutoring convenient, enjoyable and affordable. The site connects students with tutors from top colleges, and is open 24/7 – students can get SAT questions answered on-demand or can set up regular lessons with a tutor who fits their needs. Students and tutors can work together on InstaEDU’s lesson space, complete with video chat, a collaborative whiteboard, and document sharing.

Teachers and parents: do you use any of these tools with your students and children? What are your favorite test prep study tools? Share your impressions with us via Twitter to @LivescribeK12.

We’re thrilled to be at FETC 2013 this week, or the national Florida Educational Technology Corporation conference, one of the largest K-12 edtech conferences in the country. We’re also pleased to announce our new Smartpen Education Bundles and customized training programs for educators and students as part of qualified institutions so that we can offer savings to K-12 and higher ed institutions. These special offers will include savings on the Sky wifi smartpen, the latest member of the smartpen family that integrates WiFi technology and cloud services to send notes and audio wirelessly to your Evernote account. Have a closed WiFi network at your school? Not to worry. We’ve just launched our new Livescribe Helper application in order to give teachers and students the option of syncing their notes and audio from the smartpen to their Evernote account over a USB cable. To use, simply download the Helper app and use your smartpen’s micro-USB cable as an alternate way to sync to Evernote.

Dedicated to education, we’re always looking for ways to help students and teachers make the most of their smartpens in a classroom environment. The new education bundles include the smartpens, their respective accessories, and other special features such as tailored training courses and a Best Practices Guide for Educators. The Best Practices Guide includes sample learning activities for blended learning environments, group activities such as creating class portfolios with Evernote to display student work, formative assessment strategies for educators, and special tips and tricks for educators to share interactive course materials. Livescribe is also offering special training options for educators, including customized webinars and onsite professional development.

Heading to FETC yourself? Come say hello to the Livescribe team! We’ll be at booth #137 in the exhibit hall. On Thursday, January 31 at noon, visit Room S230G to learn teaching tips and techniques from educators that use Livescribe smartpens effectively in their classrooms.

To learn more about available education pricing bundles for institutions or to place an order, visit the Livescribe online store for education at http://www.livescribe.com/k20_how_to_buy.

Educators, schools, and higher education institutions interested in purchasing specially discounted education bundles may contact Livescribe for further information at educationsales@livescribe.com.

To download or learn more about the Livescribe Helper app, visit http://www.livescribe.com/en-us/support/sky/howto/.

The Sky wifi smartpen has recently been featured in the Palo Alto Technology-Using Educators (#PATUE) weekly edtech conference series. The goal of the weekly meetups, put together by Sam Patterson, Dean of Student Advising and Outreach and English teacher at Kehillah Jewish High School, is to serve teachers who would like to be more connected in edtech. Each week, the meetup is live-streamed and prepared as a video podcast, which is then followed by an online chat about the workshop’s topic.

A meetup on November 27 featured Shelley Haven, a certified assistive technology consultant who serves individuals, families, educators, school districts, private schools, and other professionals.  At the meetup, Shelley gave a presentation on a wide range of assistive technology tools that can assist students who learn differently. Included in this roundup was the Livescribe smartpen, which she explained was helpful for students who have trouble retaining concepts in class and need to play back notes for better retention. You can check out the different tech tools Shelley described on her website, where she features her “Assistive Technology Toolbox,” a wonderful resource for teachers and parents who work with students with disabilities.

Next Beth Blecherman (also known as the TechMama) gave away a Sky wifi smartpen, which she awarded to a teacher at the meetup who was interested in learning more about assistive technology tools. You can check out Beth’s summary of the meetup, “Assistive Tech Tools to Support Learning,” on her website, Techmamas.

Another PATUE meetup on December 11 was on using Livescribe smartpens along with Evernote in education, in which educators shared the different ways they’ve implemented both the cloud service and the smartpen in their classrooms.

Educators, you can check out the podcasts of the meetups here if you’re interested in learning more about education technology, and be sure to participate in the weekly chats on Twitter every Tuesday.  Check Sam Patterson’s PATUE website for details.

We recently featured Sue Park’s experience teaching math to her third-grade students using the Echo smartpen. Today we are sharing her experience working with students on reading fluency using Sound Stickers. Sue is a third-grade teacher at Lafayette Elementary School in Northern California. You can visit her class page here.

Over the summer, Sue worked with soon-to-be second graders who have had trouble with reading fluency. Reading fluency is the ability to read phrases and sentences smoothly and quickly, while understanding them as expressions of complete ideas. Children with reading fluency issues often miss the end mark cues in sentences that good readers use to read with expression. An explanation point, question mark or period can change the meaning of a sentence. If they don’t see or recognize these marks, reading sounds like a “robot voice” and meaning can be unknown.

In order to help the students read with expression, Sue explained how she looks at simple sentences, telling students to look at punctuation marks when reading aloud. Often rereading is a good strategy to help plan how a sentence should be read.

“When you see a period at the end of a sentence, your voice should go down,” Sue explained. “When there’s a question mark, your voice goes up at the end. If there is an exclamation point, the whole sentence is read with excited emotion.”

Sue then went on to animatedly explain the example she uses with her students to show how sentences with different end marks should be read. “Let’s say the sentence is ‘Liver again.’ If it has a question mark at the end – ‘Liver again?’ – obviously I don’t like liver,” said Sue. “But if there’s an exclamation point, I read ‘Liver again!’ and it shows I really like liver. We practice with sentences like these so the students can see how the meaning of the sentence can completely change if it’s not read with the right expression. In one case, you want liver, and in the other not at all!”

Sue created several tag boards with different sentences and sound stickers for students to record and practice reading with different end marks. To begin, she divided her small summer school class into pairs and had them practice reading the sentences with their partners in three different ways – once together, and twice individually. She then introduced the Echo smartpens and instructed the students how to record and delete their recording using the Sound Stickers. The students could then tap the Sound Stickers to record and to listen to themselves read. Being able to listen to their own voices helped them read more expressively. The students loved the ability to not only record and listen to themselves, but the simple way to delete and record again to repeat and practice their “best”.

Sue later used this same application with third grade students with paragraphs. Students practiced finding the sentences that indicated which expression to use and added how a sentence should be read with a comma (slight pause) and an end mark (longer pause).  Students read short paragraphs, recording and listening to themselves reading with expression and pausing correctly.

“It became very theatrical!” said Sue. “And the kids really liked it. Part of the appeal was the novelty of the smartpen and the excitement of listening to their own voices.” There are many applications with fluency that help students practice, but the ability to listen and evaluate their own reading is powerful and unique. Students can record themselves to better understand how they read aloud, including not only understanding end marks and pauses, but what words to emphasize and how to read with the appropriate emotion. Both lower and upper grades can benefit from recording and listening to themselves.

Sue experimented with other recording devices to use with her students, including the iPad, but found recording on it to be difficult. Moreover, small pocket recorders were also not practical or easy to use due to the expense and complexity. Sue found the Echo smartpen used along with the Sound Stickers to be very cost-effective. Sue also felt the smartpen was the best tool suited for her students, as it was easy to use – the second graders quickly figured out how to record themselves, listen to the recordings, and delete them when they wanted to try to do better. To be even more cost-effective, many teachers at Lafayette Elementary School share the smartpens, and laminate the Sound Stickers to reuse them among different classrooms.

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Teachers, if you’ve switched to the Sky wifi smartpen, please note that Sound Stickers for Sky have not yet been developed. But fear not! We’ve got an easy way to make your own Sound Stickers for Sky:

1. Cut a piece of dot paper into 1” squares (save the control strip on the bottom).
2. Tap the record button (use the saved control strip).
3. Make a filled circle on the 1” square of paper.
4. Speak your message.
5. Tap the stop button to end the recording.

When you tap on the filled circle it will trigger playback of the message recorded in step four.

Last week we shared the news about our Sky wifi smartpen pilot program in higher education, and this week we’re excited to announce our pilot program in K12 as well! Our pilot program will assess use cases, as well as the impact of using the Sky wifi smartpen both in and out of the classroom. The Sky wifi smartpen pilot program will culminate in the spring of 2013, at which time Livescribe will share highlights and results of the program. These results will help influence education product bundles, training and additional services in the future.

Kehillah Jewish High School

We’re kicking off our initial pilot program at Kehillah Jewish High School in Palo Alto, California. This program will explore how high school school students can use smartpens to engage in a connected and searchable education workflow and reflect on their own work to show student growth over the school year, as well as year-over-year. Students and educators will use the Sky wifi smartpen to actively support collaboration and communication.  Schoolwork and assignments, stored in Evernote notebooks, will be privately shared with students, parents and other teachers.  This makes it possible for teachers to respond and comment on work digitally.

“We’re developing a digital workflow model that makes best use of this emerging technology and empowers our students to be fully connected learners.  We are excited to finally enable our teachers to respond directly to student work in the cloud,” said Sam Patterson, Dean of Student Advising at Kehillah. He sees not only to potential for greater digital connection, but also a greater personal one: “The more we are co-users of technology with students, the more open they will be to learn and explore with us.”

You can read more about the pilot program at Sam Patterson’s website, www.mypaperlessclassroom.org, and follow us (@LivescribeK12) and Sam (@learningsliving) on Twitter for updates.

Last week was the consumer launch of our newest smartpen, the Sky wifi smartpen. We shared ideas for creating digital portfolios with the new integration of Sky and Evernote, and this week we’d like to share more information about Sky’s pilot program in higher education.

The higher education pilot program for Sky includes several highly esteemed institutions, including UC Berkeley, North Carolina State University (NCSU), and Tarrant County College – Southeast Campus. The disability services departments at both UC Berkeley and NCSU will be using Sky wifi smartpens in Loan Programs for students in need of note-taking accommodations. They will evaluate the impact of providing students with the smartpen from both student and institutional perspectives.

“UC Berkeley prides itself on being at the forefront of delivering the best and most innovative services and accommodations to our students,” said Paul Hippolitus, Director, Disabled Students’ Services at UC Berkeley. “We look forward to the pilot program and evaluating the benefit and impact of Livescribe’s wireless smartpen to provide our students with additional ways to access, interact and share information they learn in class to not only improve understanding, but to also better prepare them for entering the workforce.”

In addition, the pilot program at NCSU will also be extended to assess the impact of the Sky wifi smartpens on students in select AP courses. At Tarrant County College, the Sky wifi smartpen will be used in the mathematics department in classroom settings where the professor will use Sky and Evernote to share interactive lessons and materials with students.

Check back for updates on these pilots as well as the pilot programs in K12!

By now you’ve heard the news about our consumer launch of the Sky wifi smartpen! On the education side, we’re very excited to announce our pilot programs with education institutions to evaluate the uses and impact of the Sky wifi smartpen on learning, as we posted Monday.

One of the exciting new educational capabilities the Sky wifi smartpen makes possible is the creation of digital portfolios. Instead of collecting papers and putting them in a physical portfolio, the integration of Sky and Evernote allows students to create digital portfolios, which makes capturing and organizing information easy for students and teachers and more accessible for parents.

Students can use Sky smartpens to create more dynamic and informative digital portfolios that show student growth over the school year, as well as year-over-year. Students and educators can collect samples of student schoolwork and assignments, which can be stored in Evernote notebooks and privately shared with students, parents and other teachers. Portfolios make wonderful storehouses for projects, writing pieces, art, and performances.

Check our blog for more updates on our pilot programs, coming soon!

Today we’re excited to announce the consumer launch of our Sky wifi smartpen, the first digital pen to use WiFi technology and cloud services. Over the next few months, we’ll be engaged in extensive pilot programs with select school districts and higher education institutions to assess use cases and the impact of Sky both in and out of the classroom. The results of the pilot program will influence education bundles, training, and additional services. We’ll officially launch the Sky wifi smartpen for the education market in early 2013.

The Sky wifi smartpen digitally captures everything students, teachers, or administrators hear, write, or draw on paper and allows them to tap on the ink to hear the lecture play back from that exact moment. This allows students to listen to a teacher’s explanation of a difficult concept or new material as many times as they need. Teachers can take advantage of the new technology by recording pencasts and posting them to their class blog or website.

Sky automatically and wirelessly sends information, along with any synced audio, to Evernote. From their personal Evernote accounts, teachers and students have immediate access to play back, review, search, organize, and share notes from their computers, tablets, smartphones, or the web, so notes and other materials are available any time, anywhere.

“The Sky wifi smartpen makes it easy for educators and students to collaborate, and the new ability to sync to Evernote will allow for teachers to try interesting new projects with their classes such as digital portfolios,” said Janet Sankar, director of education at Livescribe who leads our webinar series. “With our pilot programs in K12 and higher education, we look forward to learning more about how our pilot schools utilize the Sky wifi smartpen in their classrooms.”

Check our blog for updates on our pilot programs, and digital portfolios students can create using the Sky wifi smartpen and Evernote!

Anyone who teaches middle school knows that convincing students a school project is “cool” is half the battle. Once a project or a lesson has the cool factor, getting them to participate is easy.

Matthew Galime is a math teacher at Ben Hill Middle School in Tampa, Florida, and in his six years of teaching, he’s learned a thing or two about engaging his seventh and eighth grade students. He started using the Livescribe smartpen four years ago, and initially used it to help students with homework. He started posting pencasts of sample problems to his class webpage, as well as mini lessons for students to use as refreshers while studying or before starting their homework.

Once his students started watching the pencasts, they were hooked. They were very excited about the technology and wanted to try it for themselves. Once they were sold on how “cool” it was, said Matthew, getting them to go online and review homework problems was easy.

Matthew decided to utilize the smartpen for a class project in which he had students re-create their bedrooms on a smaller scale. He had his students measure their beds and other furniture in their bedroom, then come back to class the next day and use the measurements to draw a 2-D version of their bedrooms, but smaller. The end result of the project were  three-dimensional re-creations of the students’ bedrooms. Students built their own miniature bedroom furniture out of foam board and then decorated the miniature bedrooms to look like their own real ones.

The process of converting the measurements to a smaller scale was confusing for some students, and Matthew anticipated this. So he created a pencast with instructions to the project and played them on the board in his classroom. He played the instructions on a loop so they repeated over and over. In this way, students who understood the instructions immediately could listen once and begin working on the project. For students who still needed help, they could listen to the pencast as many times as they needed while Matthew could go around the classroom and work with them individually.

“I was able to teach the process to students in the front of the room via the pencast while I went around and helped kids individually,” said Matthew.

We’ve embedded Matthew’s pencasts below, so middle school teachers — feel free to try out this cool project in your classrooms!

Explaining how to measure bedroom furniture:

Helping students understand how to make the net drawings of their furniture:

In the digital age, it’s no big secret that we don’t write by hand nearly as much as people did in the past. When documents can be typed much faster and more easily than they can be printed or written, many of us write longhand less and less.

But we don’t need to let handwriting fall by the wayside. Your handwriting is as much of a reflection of your personality as your clothing or your haircut, and in this age of technology it’s easy to forget to use it. When you look down at something you’ve handwritten, you know immediately that those thoughts, those ideas on the page belong to you.

Today we want to share a fabulous article by Philip Hensher on why handwriting matters, particularly in the digital age. In it, he describes the deeply personal aspects of handwriting:

“We have surrendered our handwriting for something more mechanical, less distinctively human, less telling about ourselves and less present in our moments of the highest happiness and the deepest emotion. Ink runs in our veins, and shows the world what we are like. The shaping of thought and written language by a pen, moved by a hand to register marks of ink on paper, has for centuries, millennia, been regarded as key to our existence as human beings. In the past, handwriting has been regarded as almost the most powerful sign of our individuality. In 1847, in an American case, a witness testified without hesitation that a signature was genuine, though he had not seen an example of the handwriting for 63 years: the court accepted his testimony.

Handwriting is what registers our individuality, and the mark which our culture has made on us. It has been seen as the unknowing key to our souls and our innermost nature. It has been regarded as a sign of our health as a society, of our intelligence, and as an object of simplicity, grace, fantasy and beauty in its own right. Yet at some point, the ordinary pleasures and dignity of handwriting are going to be replaced permanently.”

Students and teachers, reconnect with your own handwriting today by actually writing something! Whether it’s a grocery list, a letter, a draft of a paper, a to-do list, or even just your name, grab a pen and reconnect to that deeply personal aspect of writing that’s yours and yours alone.