The document discusses the use of an iPad in a university seminar for reading and writing, focusing on its application in annotating PDFs and providing feedback on student work. It outlines potential limitations of the device, such as keyboard issues and file organization challenges, while highlighting useful apps like iAnnotate, Evernote, and Soundnote for academic purposes. Student feedback indicates a preference for convenience and functionality, along with suggestions for improving the format of returned comments.

1. "Sitting up & taking notes":
Using the iPad for reading
and writing
Johan Geertsema
University Scholars Programme
January 2012
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2. Outline
1. Context
• Teaching
• iPad, including potential limitations
• Apps, main apps used
2. iAnnotate PDF main focus:
• marking up course readings; providing feedback on student work
• functionality: examples
• problems & student feedback: inferences
• summary of advantages
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3. Teaching context
• Used the iPad as an integral part of teaching a small
research seminar in the University Scholars Programme
(undergraduate)
• As instructor used it in mainly two ways—both relating to
PDF documents:
1. Marking up and annotating course readings
2. Marking up student work: feedback & grading
• Small class: ca. 10 students (who did not use iPads)
• Multiple drafts; revision is key
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4. iPad
Skeptics might ask (certainly have asked):
Just a big smartphone (albeit one that can‟t make calls
…)?
Entertainment mainly? Video, games, surfing
Can it be a replacement for a laptop?
They might then ask:
How can I use the iPad in my teaching?
What actual benefits might it have?
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5. Potential limitations
1. Arranging all files into folders as on Mac or PC not possible
✳ But search function works well
2. Non-tactile keyboard: some find this annoying, and it seems
true that typing is slower/more awkward
3. Though wireless keyboard is possible, not ideal due to
touchscreen interface
✳ Lack of mouse: the whole point of the iPad interface is to
use one‟s fingers, but that makes an external keyboard
awkward
✳ Because of its small size and touchscreen interface iPad is best
used for more limited kinds of writing, but does this very well.
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6. Apps
Of course, there are zillions (well, thousands) of brilliant
“apps” available in Apple‟s App Store.
Fascinating things one could do with the iPad, also in the
classroom.
Modelling, virtual reality: very many high-tech things.
But: I am not really a very high-tech person—rather, an
ordinary educator using the iPad in class as part of CIT‟s
Loan Scheme
Main purpose for which I have used iPad is a very basic
one: taking notes, in particular annotating texts
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7. Main apps used
Some note taking apps:
iAnnotate: for reading and annotating PDF files (my focus)
Evernote and Soundnote: for creating and organizing notes
Kobo and Bluefire Reader: for reading and annotating
eBooks—DRM-protected ePub files
While note taking is a very basic function, it is one all academic
readers and writers—whether students or faculty—engage in
regularly: & of course very valuable pedagogically.
 Research: documentation, highlighting key words, etc.
 Feedback to students
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8. Evernote
• creating text notes; clipping web pages with desktop
version; taking photos
• excellent organizational functionality: tagging and
notebooks, e.g. for individual research projects,
classes taught
• allows syncing with the company‟s servers—„in the
cloud‟—and thus across devices: for backing up +
having identical sets of notes on iPad, iPhone,
desktops
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10. SoundNote
• less customizable as far as organizing notes is
concerned, but excellent for taking notes of live
presentations
• data file keeps the audio in sync with the text you
have typed so it knows where within the audio to
jump to when you click a word or drawing during
playback
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12. Kobo & Bluefire Reader
Kobo
• Very much social-media oriented
• Good built-in dictionary
• Most recent versions allow for syncing and backing up of
notes, bookmarks, highlighting through cloud to other
iOS devices
• No search function!
Bluefire Reader
• Decent search function
• No syncing of notes!
• Apple‟s iBooks and Amazon‟s Kindle: books not readily
accessible / for sale in Singapore
• Skoob: Singtel‟s recent eBookstore & app
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13. iAnnotate PDF:
Course readings
 Great advantage of having course readings in PDF is
that the text is searchable.
 Many / most journals available electronically in
searchable PDF.
 Where that‟s not the case, or when the reading
comes from a book, I have a scanned version of it
that I „OCR‟ on desktop computer.
 Acrobat‟s Optical Character Recognition function
(Document --> OCR Text Recognition) renders the
text searchable.
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14. iAnnotate PDF:
Grading / feedback
Students:
• upload submissions (PDF or Word or slides) to IVLE
Workbin
• 5-20 pp. long: research proposals, presentations,
different drafts of papers
Instructor:
• downloads zip file to desktop
• syncs files to iPad with Dropbox
• or downloads them directly from IVLE using CIT‟s app
• opens files in iAnnotate and proceeds to read and mark
them up
• emails individual files back to students
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15. iAnnotate PDF:
Functionality
• Reading and searching through PDF files, but especially (of
course) annotating them
• Finger-based interface makes annotating a breeze
• Same main kinds of annotation as in Acrobat:
• highlighting text and then commenting
• using the typewriter function for more immediately visible in-
text annotations
• drawing with the finger
• flexibility with customizing toolbars and page sizes
• search function, both within and across documents
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16. Annotated pages
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17. Highlighting text and then
commenting
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18. Typewriter function
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19. Drawing
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20. Problems using the app
• Not many problems: very stable
• Students highlighted some issues (will get to them)
• But: larger and / or more graphics-intensive files, in
particular some scanned files, can take too long to
load when e.g. moving from one page to another or
zooming in and out.
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21. Loading …
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22. Loading …
• Sometimes it can take 10 seconds or even longer; this is the one
area where I have found using iAnnotate, and the iPad more
generally, deficient when reading PDFs.
• Workaround: reduce document seize, and/or OCR.
• iPad is not usable in classroom situations in the case of scanned
files that exhibit this behaviour, since it simply takes too long to
turn pages.
• Hopefully iPad 3 will have more internal memory and a faster
processor?
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23. Student Feedback
Question
8. Did you find my COMMENTS on your writing
helpful? Please elaborate on: (a) the quality and
quantity of comments you received (b) the format
in which you received them (PDF)
Caveats:
Small seminar-style class
Have run survey once only
I.e. these results are statistically not significant, but
even so I have found them useful.
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24. Student Feedback
Responses (1)
I find the comments REALLY helpful…. The PDF format is good
because it saves the student the hassle to print it out or to
rush to school to submit the paper. However there might be
technical glitches here and there. 11/20/2011 12:27 AM
Certainly! The comments I received really helped me progress
to the next stage of the research process and I do find the
format neat. One grouse I have with this format is that I can't
print it out (as I prefer to have a hard copy with me as I edit
instead of having to switch between windows on my laptop). So
in summary, the format was really neat (at least it's completely
legible …) but I would have preferred to be able to print them
without having too much hassle copying and pasting the
comments. 11/11/2011 2:40 PM
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25. Student Feedback
Responses (2)
Yes I do find your comments very helpful…. a. the quality of comments I
received so far is critical enough. …. b. I sometimes struggle[d] clicking
the comments one by one, especially if I need to print it from a PC. I
must open all the comments in the .pdf file then print as .pdf from my mac,
then send to my email to be printed from a PC computer. However, it's
nice to receive the last commented conference paper draft because
the comments are put as endnotes. I am not sure if this is very
subjective, but the latter is much more friendly to me! 11/10/2011 12:49
Yes, I would have preferred it printed out with pen marks but that's
because I'm a traditional person and have a small screen so I can't see
everything. 11/9/2011 11:41 PM
I think the comments on the papers were very helpful in pointing out
mistakes and errors in my paper that I would have otherwise not noticed.
The PDF format was also very easy to read and convenient 11/9/2011
9:53 PM
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26. Inferences
Students note convenience and user friendliness,
though there may be technical issues.
Printing is a key issue for some: want to work on
paper, yet didn‟t know how they could print the file
with all the comments included.
Indication that some prefer separately listed
comments.
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27. Therefore …
I will this semester do two or three things differently:
1. Use iAnnotate‟s “Flattening” function when
returning papers. It prints all annotations by page
and line number with hyperlinks at the end of the
document.
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28. Flattening a file
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29. Flattened notes
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30. or:
2.Provide students with a separate file, generated by
iAnnotate, that lists comments
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31. or:
2.Provide them with a separate file that lists comments
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32. Notes
• Notes extracted
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33. and …
3. Most importantly, brief students better, e.g. how to
view the documents (and/or print them)
• I simply assumed students would know how to
open and print marked-up PDF documents—and
access the annotations: invalid assumption
4. Would be really great if students could use the app
on the iPad for their own pack of course readings,
and for accessing my comments on their
assignments: CIT??
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34. Finally: some main
advantages
• Student work in PDF: document not editable
In my view, students must decide how to use my feedback: providing
feedback in a Word document has always seemed to me to be too
interventionist, coming too close to making revisions that should
properly speaking be carried out by the student. (This is especially
the case where students submit multiple drafts, as they do for my
classes: I teaching writing and critical thinking in the USP.)
• Searchability: finding passages with key terms very convenient
• Mobility: on the bus, the plane, in a compact device
• ‘Centrality’: really useful to take iPad into classroom rather than stacks
of paper—all notes on all class readings are centrally available, and all
student papers / projects
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35. Thank you!
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