24-03-2011, 10:37 AM
[attachment=10887]
SMART NOTE TAKER
1.1 INTRODUCTION
The Smart Note Taker is such a helpful product that satisfies the needs of the people in today’s technologic and fast life. This product can be used in many ways. The Smart NoteTaker provides taking fast and easy notes to people who are busy one’s self with something. With the help of Smart Note Taker, people will be able to write notes on the air, while being busy with their work. The written note will be stored on the memory chip of the pen, and will be able to read in digital medium after the job has done. This will save time and facilitate life.
The Smart NoteTaker is good and helpful for blinds that think and write freely. Another place, where our product can play an important role, is where two people talks on the phone. The subscribers are apart from each other while their talk, and they may want to use figures or texts to understand themselves better. It’s also useful especially for instructors in presentations. The instructors may not want to present the lecture in front of the board. The drawn figure can be processed and directly sent to the server computer in the room. The server computer then can broadcast the drawn shape through network to all of the computers which are present in the room. By this way, the lectures are aimed to be more efficient and fun. This product will be simple but powerful. The product will be able to sense 3D shapes and motions that user tries to draw. The sensed information will be processed and transferred to the memory chip and then will be monitored on the display device. The drawn shape then can be broadcasted to the network or sent to a mobile device.
There will be an additional feature of the product which will monitor the notes, which were taken before, on the application program used in the computer. This application program can be a word document or an image file. Then, the sensed figures that were drawn onto the air will be recognized and by the help of the software program we will write, the desired character will be printed in the word document. If the application program is a paint related program, then the most similar shape will be chosen by the program and then will be printed on the screen.
Since, JAVA Applet is suitable for both the drawings and strings, all these applications can be put together by developing a single JAVA program. The JAVA code that we will develop will also be installed on the pen so that the processor inside the pen will type and draw the desired shape or text on the display panel.
The prior market is educational services and schools. In today’s fast and information based life; the faster and easier you get information, the more successful you are. The customers are going to be generally teachers and indirectly students. While lecturing the usage of the board for teachers and note-taking for students cause dilute of time and sometimes it is embarrassing. In order to utilitize the time and to take more attention of students smart notetaker is a great solution, which transfers the notes of the teacher on the board to software directly. It optimizes efficiency of time that is used during the lecturing and it is desirable for the educational.
Note-Taker: Enabling Students who are Legally Blind to Take Notes in Class
1. ABSTRACT
The act of note-taking is a key component of learning in secondary and post-secondary classrooms. Students who take notes retain information from classroom lectures better, even if they never refer to those notes afterward. However, students who are legally blind, and who wish to take notes in their classrooms are at a disadvantage. Simply equipping classrooms with lecture recording systems does not substitute for note taking, since it does not actively engage the student in note-taking during the lecture. In this paper we detail the problems encountered by one math and computer science student who is legally blind, and we present our proposed solution: the CUbiC Note-Taker, which is a highly portable device that requires no prior classroom setup, and does not require lecturers to adapt their presentations. We also present results from two case studies of the Note-Taker, totaling more than 200 hours of in-class use.
2. INTRODUCTION
Overhead projectors, digital projectors, whiteboards and chalkboards are often used to convey information in educational environments, such as classrooms. However, these visual display methods are not inherently accessible to individuals who are legally blind, and may put them at a disadvantage, compared to their peers. Several methods have been proposed to make classroom presentations more accessible to students who are legally blind. For example, lectures might be recorded (for later review) or a human note-taker might be hired to take notes, which are then provided to the student. However, these approaches do not engage students who are legally blind in the process of understanding and participating in classroom presentations, and might even encourage them to skip class. To improve accessibility of classroom lectures for students who are legally blind, and to encourage them to take notes, we have developed the Note-Taker. This device requires no existing infrastructure or prior setup in a classroom, and does not require the lecturer to adjust the presentation. However, it makes classroom presentations accessible to many students who are legally blind.
In developing the Note-Taker, we investigated the usability and the shortcomings of current assistive technologies that might be used by students who are legally blind in the classroom (Sections 3 and 4). Based on these findings, we prototyped a solution that addressed these shortcomings (Section 5), and conducted two case studies (Section 6). In the first case study, the first author (who is himself legally blind) used the Note-Taker for an entire semester; in the second case study, another student (who is also legally blind) used a second Note-Taker prototype in classes for one month.
3. PROBLEM STATEMENT
The Note-Taker project was born out of necessity when the first author, David, found that traditional methods of notetaking were proving unsuccessful. In his own words, “Before senior-level math, I aced college by keeping up with note-taking in lectures as best I could. For some classes, mostly math, it was necessary that I spent extra time in the textbook or reading third-party material, but I always managed to get the grade. Senior-level math was like a slap in the face. Quite suddenly I had no way of keeping up with note-taking, but needed to. We’d fill the boards up half a dozen times proving lemmas and theorems that relied on those lemmas. I routinely got lost in the theorem proofs because in one case, I’d opt not to take notes (and thus Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.
ASSETS’08, October 13–15, 2008, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Copyright 2008 ACM 978-1-59593-976-0/08/10...$5.00. forget the lemma by the time of the theorem) or I’d opt to take notes, which entailed such a frantic pace that the lecture was essentially useless. In either case, I wasn’t
getting the intuition behind the proofs that the lecture was so importantly attempting to provide.
Having had all of high school and most of college to try out the various classroom assistive technologies, I knew that nothing off-the-shelf was going to fix my problem. That’s when I approached the lab and started bouncing ideas around.” Through a series of brainstorming exercises, discussions and informal experiments, we found that David’s problems stemmed from one primary issue: As he used a monocular to view the board at the front of the classroom, there was a delay each time David switched from viewing the board to his notes, or from his notes back to the board. These delays stemmed from sitting up to see the board and then hunching down to within a few inches from his notes on the desktop. David especially lost time when trying to use his monocular to find and return to the relevant spot on the chalkboard (or whiteboard) at the front of the classroom. Over time, these Board-Note-Board (BNB) delays accumulated to the point that David was unable to keep pace with the lecture. Here is how David described the situation: “Going from notes to the board was the big problem. I would say it was akin to finding Waldo while limiting your view to a square inch of the page. What I needed was something that allowed me to view the board and my notes near-simultaneously, like a fully-sighted student. Then I’d stand a chance at keeping up with the lecture.” A related problem was that David’s monocular of choice, the Ocutech [2], provided only a fixed 6X zoom. This sometimes proved insufficient in classes where the board was filled multiple times, since his professors were writing smaller than he was accustomed to. Particularly when David used his Ocutech to try to keep up with notes, he frequently got eyestrain headaches that limited his subsequent ability to read – sometimes for up to 12 hours after the class. Despite a thorough literature survey and product review, we found no solution to be satisfactory, so set out to create our own.
4. RELATED WORK
It has been shown that active note-taking in class helps students recall information – even if the notes are not studied subsequently outside of class [1]. It has also been shown that note-taking produces a pattern of interaction in which notetakers performed better on far-transfer tasks, such as problem solving in STEM classes [2]. Note-taking also promotes a deeper level of understanding (rather than just more learning overall) due to the assimilative encoding process that is engaged [3,4].
4.1 Alternatives to Note-Taking
One common alternative to active, personal note-taking is university-supplied human note-takers. (Availability of such note-taking services is mandated by the Americans with Disabilities Act [5] in the United States.) These note-takers are typically another student in the class who is paid a stipend ($25 per credit hour at Arizona State University) to provide the student who is legally blind with copies of his/her notes.
While sometimes helpful, such note-taking services do not engage the legally blind student in classroom learning as effectively as active, personal note-taking. For instance, David found that notes provided by university-supplied human note-takers were often of limited value because he did not create them, and they did not reflect his way of thinking. In his own words, David found these notes “as foreign as a textbook – only less legible.”
4.2 Popular Assistive Devices for People with Low Vision
The most widely used approach for helping people with low vision (including legal blindness) is to provide magnification.
Magnifiers can be broadly classified into two categories:
those that are aimed at improving near sight (for tasks such as reading, writing, or manual tasks) and those that are aimed at improving far sight (for tasks such as identifying an approaching bus, watching a movie, or simply enjoying scenery).
Designing a magnification device for improving near sight is relatively simple. Many near sight tasks (such as reading and writing) are done while seated, so the size and the weight of the magnifier is less critical. It is even practical to use AC power to run a device such as a magnifier lamp, as shown in 2(a), or a CCTV magnifier for reading, as shown in 2(b). Even a computer can be used to facilitate reading if the document is available in electronic form, and if magnification
software such as ZoomText (shown in 2©) is used to enlarge the text on the display screen.
SMART NOTE TAKER
1.1 INTRODUCTION
The Smart Note Taker is such a helpful product that satisfies the needs of the people in today’s technologic and fast life. This product can be used in many ways. The Smart NoteTaker provides taking fast and easy notes to people who are busy one’s self with something. With the help of Smart Note Taker, people will be able to write notes on the air, while being busy with their work. The written note will be stored on the memory chip of the pen, and will be able to read in digital medium after the job has done. This will save time and facilitate life.
The Smart NoteTaker is good and helpful for blinds that think and write freely. Another place, where our product can play an important role, is where two people talks on the phone. The subscribers are apart from each other while their talk, and they may want to use figures or texts to understand themselves better. It’s also useful especially for instructors in presentations. The instructors may not want to present the lecture in front of the board. The drawn figure can be processed and directly sent to the server computer in the room. The server computer then can broadcast the drawn shape through network to all of the computers which are present in the room. By this way, the lectures are aimed to be more efficient and fun. This product will be simple but powerful. The product will be able to sense 3D shapes and motions that user tries to draw. The sensed information will be processed and transferred to the memory chip and then will be monitored on the display device. The drawn shape then can be broadcasted to the network or sent to a mobile device.
There will be an additional feature of the product which will monitor the notes, which were taken before, on the application program used in the computer. This application program can be a word document or an image file. Then, the sensed figures that were drawn onto the air will be recognized and by the help of the software program we will write, the desired character will be printed in the word document. If the application program is a paint related program, then the most similar shape will be chosen by the program and then will be printed on the screen.
Since, JAVA Applet is suitable for both the drawings and strings, all these applications can be put together by developing a single JAVA program. The JAVA code that we will develop will also be installed on the pen so that the processor inside the pen will type and draw the desired shape or text on the display panel.
The prior market is educational services and schools. In today’s fast and information based life; the faster and easier you get information, the more successful you are. The customers are going to be generally teachers and indirectly students. While lecturing the usage of the board for teachers and note-taking for students cause dilute of time and sometimes it is embarrassing. In order to utilitize the time and to take more attention of students smart notetaker is a great solution, which transfers the notes of the teacher on the board to software directly. It optimizes efficiency of time that is used during the lecturing and it is desirable for the educational.
Note-Taker: Enabling Students who are Legally Blind to Take Notes in Class
1. ABSTRACT
The act of note-taking is a key component of learning in secondary and post-secondary classrooms. Students who take notes retain information from classroom lectures better, even if they never refer to those notes afterward. However, students who are legally blind, and who wish to take notes in their classrooms are at a disadvantage. Simply equipping classrooms with lecture recording systems does not substitute for note taking, since it does not actively engage the student in note-taking during the lecture. In this paper we detail the problems encountered by one math and computer science student who is legally blind, and we present our proposed solution: the CUbiC Note-Taker, which is a highly portable device that requires no prior classroom setup, and does not require lecturers to adapt their presentations. We also present results from two case studies of the Note-Taker, totaling more than 200 hours of in-class use.
2. INTRODUCTION
Overhead projectors, digital projectors, whiteboards and chalkboards are often used to convey information in educational environments, such as classrooms. However, these visual display methods are not inherently accessible to individuals who are legally blind, and may put them at a disadvantage, compared to their peers. Several methods have been proposed to make classroom presentations more accessible to students who are legally blind. For example, lectures might be recorded (for later review) or a human note-taker might be hired to take notes, which are then provided to the student. However, these approaches do not engage students who are legally blind in the process of understanding and participating in classroom presentations, and might even encourage them to skip class. To improve accessibility of classroom lectures for students who are legally blind, and to encourage them to take notes, we have developed the Note-Taker. This device requires no existing infrastructure or prior setup in a classroom, and does not require the lecturer to adjust the presentation. However, it makes classroom presentations accessible to many students who are legally blind.
In developing the Note-Taker, we investigated the usability and the shortcomings of current assistive technologies that might be used by students who are legally blind in the classroom (Sections 3 and 4). Based on these findings, we prototyped a solution that addressed these shortcomings (Section 5), and conducted two case studies (Section 6). In the first case study, the first author (who is himself legally blind) used the Note-Taker for an entire semester; in the second case study, another student (who is also legally blind) used a second Note-Taker prototype in classes for one month.
3. PROBLEM STATEMENT
The Note-Taker project was born out of necessity when the first author, David, found that traditional methods of notetaking were proving unsuccessful. In his own words, “Before senior-level math, I aced college by keeping up with note-taking in lectures as best I could. For some classes, mostly math, it was necessary that I spent extra time in the textbook or reading third-party material, but I always managed to get the grade. Senior-level math was like a slap in the face. Quite suddenly I had no way of keeping up with note-taking, but needed to. We’d fill the boards up half a dozen times proving lemmas and theorems that relied on those lemmas. I routinely got lost in the theorem proofs because in one case, I’d opt not to take notes (and thus Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.
ASSETS’08, October 13–15, 2008, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Copyright 2008 ACM 978-1-59593-976-0/08/10...$5.00. forget the lemma by the time of the theorem) or I’d opt to take notes, which entailed such a frantic pace that the lecture was essentially useless. In either case, I wasn’t
getting the intuition behind the proofs that the lecture was so importantly attempting to provide.
Having had all of high school and most of college to try out the various classroom assistive technologies, I knew that nothing off-the-shelf was going to fix my problem. That’s when I approached the lab and started bouncing ideas around.” Through a series of brainstorming exercises, discussions and informal experiments, we found that David’s problems stemmed from one primary issue: As he used a monocular to view the board at the front of the classroom, there was a delay each time David switched from viewing the board to his notes, or from his notes back to the board. These delays stemmed from sitting up to see the board and then hunching down to within a few inches from his notes on the desktop. David especially lost time when trying to use his monocular to find and return to the relevant spot on the chalkboard (or whiteboard) at the front of the classroom. Over time, these Board-Note-Board (BNB) delays accumulated to the point that David was unable to keep pace with the lecture. Here is how David described the situation: “Going from notes to the board was the big problem. I would say it was akin to finding Waldo while limiting your view to a square inch of the page. What I needed was something that allowed me to view the board and my notes near-simultaneously, like a fully-sighted student. Then I’d stand a chance at keeping up with the lecture.” A related problem was that David’s monocular of choice, the Ocutech [2], provided only a fixed 6X zoom. This sometimes proved insufficient in classes where the board was filled multiple times, since his professors were writing smaller than he was accustomed to. Particularly when David used his Ocutech to try to keep up with notes, he frequently got eyestrain headaches that limited his subsequent ability to read – sometimes for up to 12 hours after the class. Despite a thorough literature survey and product review, we found no solution to be satisfactory, so set out to create our own.
4. RELATED WORK
It has been shown that active note-taking in class helps students recall information – even if the notes are not studied subsequently outside of class [1]. It has also been shown that note-taking produces a pattern of interaction in which notetakers performed better on far-transfer tasks, such as problem solving in STEM classes [2]. Note-taking also promotes a deeper level of understanding (rather than just more learning overall) due to the assimilative encoding process that is engaged [3,4].
4.1 Alternatives to Note-Taking
One common alternative to active, personal note-taking is university-supplied human note-takers. (Availability of such note-taking services is mandated by the Americans with Disabilities Act [5] in the United States.) These note-takers are typically another student in the class who is paid a stipend ($25 per credit hour at Arizona State University) to provide the student who is legally blind with copies of his/her notes.
While sometimes helpful, such note-taking services do not engage the legally blind student in classroom learning as effectively as active, personal note-taking. For instance, David found that notes provided by university-supplied human note-takers were often of limited value because he did not create them, and they did not reflect his way of thinking. In his own words, David found these notes “as foreign as a textbook – only less legible.”
4.2 Popular Assistive Devices for People with Low Vision
The most widely used approach for helping people with low vision (including legal blindness) is to provide magnification.
Magnifiers can be broadly classified into two categories:
those that are aimed at improving near sight (for tasks such as reading, writing, or manual tasks) and those that are aimed at improving far sight (for tasks such as identifying an approaching bus, watching a movie, or simply enjoying scenery).
Designing a magnification device for improving near sight is relatively simple. Many near sight tasks (such as reading and writing) are done while seated, so the size and the weight of the magnifier is less critical. It is even practical to use AC power to run a device such as a magnifier lamp, as shown in 2(a), or a CCTV magnifier for reading, as shown in 2(b). Even a computer can be used to facilitate reading if the document is available in electronic form, and if magnification
software such as ZoomText (shown in 2©) is used to enlarge the text on the display screen.
