Notability

NOTABILITY

Notability is a full-featured note-taking app for iOS that helps students take notes they’ll want to review, revisit, and actively use. If there’s a chart in the textbook they want to reference quickly, they can snap a picture and add it to their notes. If a concept is better explained by drawing a picture, they can do it right there, too.
On a single page of notes, students can type, write, draw, highlight, record audio, cut, paste, and even insert content captured from websites.
When they’re finished, students can organize notes for later easy access. The audio recording feature is especially flexible. If you play from the start of the recording, the notes you took darken and fill in as the recording continues, letting you see the notes appear as you wrote them. Similarly, you can tap on any point of the note (whether it’s writing, typing, or a photo) and jump to that point in the audio recording.
Students can also use Notability to organize their notes, tagging them by colour and organizing them by tags or categories. Users can also share their notes across a variety of platforms (like Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box), via email or iTunes, or across devices through the Notability app itself.

Notes Creator

Pedagogical background
Notability equips all students to take high-impact notes. While note taking may be a way for students to get down important information, not all students benefit from the note-taking process.
Notability recognizes that students have different learning needs and note-taking preferences. Students can choose to record as they talk or record their teachers’ lectures and make minimal written notes (“test review starts here!”) to help them jump to appropriate points in the audio recording when they revisit their notes later.
Students can also record themselves sharing key information or record a conversation with a teacher when they received feedback or reviewed for an assessment. Learners who respond better to images or drawings can add photographs and drawings to their notes, while learners who excel with charts and diagrams can create such images with a stylus or with their finger.
With best-in-class audio features plus lots of ways to take, share, and save notes, this tool is a great fit for students with a range of learning needs and at a range of grade levels. Teachers will love it, too.

Assessment
It can be used for summative assessment or for formative assessment to stimulate reflection or critical thinking. This second option is the most interesting in terms of learning and soft skills development. Quizzes can be performed by students by themselves or during class: the tool automatically grades the performance.
The teacher can also prepare feedback (that is shown automatically by the tool) or discuss results in class together with students.
For instance in one of the cases analyzed the teacher gives students a question about a physics problem to be attempted individually. Then the teacher asks students to discuss among peers about their answers to the question in group of 2 or 3.
After few minutes he stops the discussion and he asks students to answer again individually. At the end the teacher shows the right answer.
This use of classroom response system has been undertaken in a large classroom (more than 200 students) to stimulate engagement, self reflection and discussion among peers.

Use cases/examples of usage: (tutorial)

Strenght:
• Sync audio and handwriting together.
• Password protected notes.
• Multi-note support.
• Fonts.
• Lists.
• Endless scrolling.
• Backup to GDrive, DropBox, OneDrive, and WebDAV.
• Sharing links.

Weakness:
• Notability enables you to create a subject or a divider to organize your files and folders. Your notes are organized into subjects and subjects are divided by dividers. You can only use these three levels to organize your notes. There is no option to use nested folders (i.e. subfolders inside the folders).
• This is definitely not an app for drawing or being creative. It’s only function is to take notes in all different ways.
• The price of the last version has been considered expensive by many users.

People opinion about the tool: https://www.g2.com/products/notability/reviews

Similar Tool: Good Notes 5; Evernote; Google Keep; Microsoft OneNote; Evernote.

Technical and operational requirements: A mobile/PC.