Using iAnnotate

A while ago I read a post in the Chronicle of Higher Education's ProfHacker blog that really caught my attention about the iAnnotate PDF app for the iPad. The author, Doug Ward, had a cool idea about using voice recording to grade papers. I am going to give that a shot this semester, but in the meantime started playing with the app for other things. I had a long meeting this morning, so I opened the agenda as a PDF file in iAnnotate (it automatically takes a Word document and opens it as a PDF). When I wanted to take notes during the meeting, I did so directly onto the agenda using a stylus (you can type as well or do both as you like in a variety of way). Once the meeting was over, I exported the file into Dropbox.

I just finished my first month as chair of my department, and I am acutely aware of the amount of paper I will be receiving, so this is a welcome way of remaining as paperless and--even more critically--as organized possible. And with Dropbox, I don't have to worry about losing the notes.

Incidentally, if you in academia and are not familiar with ProfHacker, then you should give it a look. It focuses on technology for research and the classroom, but also on time management, productivity in general, and other issues that everyone face.