U-Note: Capture the Class and Access it Everywhere.

We present U-Note, an augmented teaching and learning system
leveraging the advantages of paper while letting teachers and pupils benefit
from the richness that digital media can bring to a lecture. U-Note provides
automatic linking between the notes of the pupils’ notebooks and various events
that occurred during the class (such as opening digital documents, changing
slides, writing text on an interactive whiteboard...). Pupils can thus explore their
notes in conjunction with the digital documents that were presented by the
teacher during the lesson. Additionally, they can also listen to what the teacher
was saying when a given note was written. Finally, they can add their own
comments and documents to their notebooks to extend their lecture notes.
We interviewed teachers and deployed questionnaires to identify both teachers
and pupils’ habits: most of the teachers use (or would like to use) digital
documents in their lectures but have problems in sharing these resources with
their pupils. The results of this study also show that paper remains the primary
medium used for knowledge keeping, sharing and editing by the pupils.
Based on these observations, we designed U-Note, which is built on three
modules. U-Teach captures the context of the class: audio recordings, the
whiteboard contents, together with the web pages, videos and slideshows
displayed during the lesson. U-Study binds pupils’ paper notes (taken with an
Anoto digital pen) with the data coming from U-Teach and lets pupils access
the class materials at home, through their notebooks. U-Move lets pupils
browse lecture materials on their smartphone when they are not in front of a
computer.