Notability
Flexible note-taking tool empowers learners of all abilities
Take a look inside 1 video | 4 images
Notability
Pros: With multiple note-taking, sharing, and organization options, this is a great tool for app-enabled note-taking.
Cons: Some features are trickier to use than others, and the audio files can get big.
Bottom Line: An excellent tool that lets students make their notes thorough and useful in the way that best suits their learning styles and abilities.
Having students take notes isn't the only way to use Notability in the classroom; it's a great tool for teachers too. For example, before an exam, you might create a review sheet and email it to students, or pre-annotate classroom readings to focus students' attention and model close reading. Students can use Notability to organize and store notes for a unit and then share these stored notes with students who were absent or those who need help reviewing for an exam. Notability can be an asset for collaborative learning and group projects as well, since students can brainstorm ideas, take research notes, and then quickly share them with their group members.
Kids with learning and attention differences will love Notability's flexibility. Work with your students to come up with strategies for using the note-taking and audio-recording features to capture what's going on in class and help kids focus their efforts on understanding rather than writing furiously. Get creative with the audio features; they're a terrific way to collaborate with your students. Use the app to annotate a student's submitted paper or assignment and narrate your annotations as you go, giving students a guided tour of your feedback.
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 color 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.
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.
Keep in mind that not all of these options work for everyone, and it might be overwhelming if you try to use them all at once. It's up to students and their teachers to develop thoughtful, efficient strategies for using the app's many capabilities in the most efficient, most meaningful way possible.
Learning Rating
Community Rating
Great for notetaking
This is a great note taking app that acts as a blank slate. It works nicely in that it disappears and lets the user freely take notes. It allows for good organization into dividers and importing documents and sharing them is easy to learn, but not completely intuitive. I like the feature of having the iPad complete your drawings which is good for math and geometry and lines.
There are a lot of features that sound really good but in practicality are pretty useless in my opinion. Granted, it's good for different kinds of learners because these features might actually help students who benefit from hearing the lecture again. But for the voice recording feature, when you call back to the moment the note was written, it's often too late because we write on a delay, thus making this feature basically unusable. Plus, if you're the kind of person to reorganize your notes, this feature doesn't have that flow that it's supposed to have.
However, again this is a good blank slate. It has plenty of colors and options for different papers and importing screenshots and then writing over them is a good feature. Too bad there's no way to collaborate on certain notes in real time.
Explore Our Favorite Tools
