Social media and technology can do wonderful things for students.  When it comes to taking notes, however, I’ve always been a sucker for the old-school method.

While being allowed to take notes on your laptop or tablet provides an indisputable convenience for students, I couldn’t help but feel like a court-reporter, documenting everything my teachers would say as opposed to assessing each point and recording it in a way that makes sense to me. Sure, apps have been developed to help bridge this gap, to try and re-create the limitless ways one could customize their notes via pen and paper; as convenient as these apps were, it never seemed to work for me.

In the end, too often I’d find myself IMing friends, researching weekend events happening in and around DC, and finding any way to distract myself.  Social media and technology were the bane of the prodigious student in me.  Still I longed for a 2.0 solution to note-taking since I rarely revisited my hand-written notes come test-time.

Welcome, the Livescribe Smartpen.

I found this video posted by Luke Turcotte from HackCollege and I think Livescribe’s new product might be the panacea to my note-taking ills. What do you think?