On 'Notability' for teaching
As a teacher both excited by tech toys and sceptical of the promises they make, every now and then I come across a tool which proves itself across time. I wrote about some of these in my 2021 post Teaching-Technology: a personal history, including the blackboard, the Palm V and the visualiser. I’m not a tech-evangelist - as Daisy Christodoulou says in her book Teachers vs Tech: the case for an ed-tech revolution, the history of technology in education is riddled with over-promise.
But the iOS app Notability has proven itself over several years. I use this with an Apple Pencil (recommended, though not cheap) in almost every class, connecting wirelessly to a projector.
Notability is a sophisticated, well-organised and strongly supported application, which I also use for general note-taking and for reading and marking-up of PDFs (instead of printing onto lots of paper). All notes can be backed-up online via services like Google Drive and Dropbox, and iCloud syncs them to all your Apple devices, including the Mac programme. But the rest of this post is about its use in a classroom.
A new document can be projected onto the screen, with a choice of many templates (I’m currently modelling use of Cornell notes in our comparative mode classes, and the app provides the format for me). Then you can handwrite or type notes, import images and mark-up other documents after importing them. A relatively recent addition was Presentation View, which means that all the class can see is the writing area, and none of the tools. Essentially, it becomes an electronic whiteboard. My notes from each class are not ‘rubbed out’, but can be pulled up at any time in the future.
As an English teacher, my most important use is annotation/modelling: pupils can see my annotation of a poem as I sit facing them and guide their own notes. The tool bar allows me to write in a myriad of colours and with many ‘nibs’ (I like italics) and thicknesses, and similarly the highlighter has lots of options. It takes a moment to import an image into the same document (say, a photo of a pheasant for Sylvia Plath’s poem of that name), and annotate that too. And when complete, it is simple to export the entire document via the share button, sending it via email to pupils or putting it onto whatever VLE they are using. You could also mark work and return it. Any document can generate a share-link, which I have done here with some annotations from class on three poems by Derek Mahon (limited value for you since they’ve been stripped of our discussion and my commentary).
A recent tool is excellent: ‘Tape’ allows you to block out any part of the text or picture temporarily (with something like a digital Tipp-ex ribbon). So you could hide particular words and ask pupils to talk about and work out what is missing, perhaps as retrieval practice (Macbeth’s ‘If it were done’ soliloquy - months after initial study, discuss in pairs and work out which 6 words/phrases are ‘covered’). Then you wipe out the overlay ‘tape’. If pupils are using the app themselves, then this is effective self-testing.
It doesn’t finish there. Notability also has Audio, so you can record yourself (or someone else at a talk), and the audio matches its place to the point at which you take notes. Better still: the audio is transcribed in the right-hand margin (so you can scroll to find the relevant text rather than having to play the recording aloud). This is one of the features which requires a Notability Plus sub, currently at €14 but going up to €18 at the end of the month, a price I’m happy to pay.
Further: there’s a laser pointer for the screen (disappearing marks, arrows etc), and handwriting conversion (quite a challenge for my script, and I hardly ever use it).
I still use a visualiser on occasion but Notability has replaced and in some areas improved on that tool, and it comes with a strong recommendation here.