Notability App for iPad: The Note-Taking Solution for Education

May 16, 2011 in apps,iPad with 3 Comments

Notability WEI really enjoy taking my iPad to meetings because it’s sleek and slim and makes meetings productive and fun. If there is one app every teacher and student needs on their iPad it’s a note-taking app and Notability is the best I have seen. It is packed with features and is extremely easy to use.

First and foremost Notability allows you to combine your typed notes with an audio recording of the meeting. This gives you the ability to touch a word in your notes and it will play the audio that was recorded at that point in the meeting.

Note taking is completely editable including changing font size and inserting images. You can even insert pictures and web clips and create your own drawings. I love to doodle ideas during meetings and was pleased to find that the bottom menu bar included: Insert Picture, Insert Figure, Insert Web Clip. To draw I selected Insert Figure and created a sketch and hit Done. Notability frames your art and adds it to your notes keeping everything neat. You can reframe it and move it wherever you’d like within the note. Since you can audio record the lecture while typing notes, you can always play it back to hear what you missed. Adding pictures and drawings to your notes is easy and looks great.I was surprised that Notability does not allow you to insert a picture from your camera within the app. If you wanted to take a picture of the science experiment or speaker you would need to exit and then add it from Insert Picture. I hope Notability adds the option of incorporating the rear and front camera use in a future update.

Notability packs a lot of features. The top menu bar allows you to stay organized by creating folders and deleting notes, but the real power of this note-taking app lies in its versatility to export your work. You are able to email your note or send it to iTunes as a recording! I use both iDisk and DropBox and those options are built in as well, so when I leave my meeting and return to my office, I can access my notes on my desktop or iPhone. Now that’s productivity!

Ease of use is never to be underestimated, and Notability is built right. A first-time user will be able to navigate and use this powerful app with ease. Upon opening the application and selecting the note-taking icon the note is automatically numbered and dated. Adding audio is as simple as touching the red recording button. (The typed notes and audio sync automatically.) The plentiful and powerful other features are displayed in a top and bottom menu bar that is easier to navigate than Pages which makes it a thousand times easier than Microsoft Word. Tab, spacing, font size and color, are all readily available.

With Notability the iPad is now all you need at your meeting.  You have a fabulous note taking editor that records audio, text, photos, web clips, and more and creates a beautiful document to export easily in various formats.  Wow!

Wired Educator Grades Notability: A+
Comments: A must-have app for every student, teacher, and iPad owner. An excellent app. Add to cart and proceed to checkout. Would love to see a future update include camera support within the app and add iCal integration. Notability is normally $4.99 and is on sale in iTunes at the time of this post for $.99. What are you waiting for?!?

Lorrain Croy

“lorrain croy”

About kcroy:

All Posts by  |  Personal Blog  |  Twitter  |  Facebook  |  Share By Email
  • Anonymous

    You should try Springpad. I’m beginning to think it is the greatest app ever, for person and educational use.

  • Anonymous

    Version 3 looks nothing like the photos above, and infact is quite awful. I have emailed the developer my feedback and have been ignored, so i posted to the Facebook page, and my post was deleted.

    The new Aqua/candified interface of v3 makes the app look like something most suitable to a 5 year old’s xylophone, circa OSX 10.0

    I appreciate that one can change the colours, but the whole candy interface is still an eyesore (as compared to refined, subtle, classy and mature textured tan leather look of version 2. Even the app icon has changed from leather book to candy blue). Even the file browser names are much bigger font (and cannot be changed) and the bubbles around each folder are massive. I don’t need a fluorescent yellow cartoon/icon next to each subject group, surrounded my fluorescent yellow highlighting with fat psychedelic colours around it. Each item now resembles the windows7 start menu.

    Furthermore the forced page breaks are a disaster also, they cannot be disabled, I have been happily storing documents that i had written in macjournal, and exported to RTFD.  They have a combination of pictures and text, your forced page breaks are a disaster to my photos, I can only fit 2 photos per page, and the next photo cannot follow (across a page break) hence the text is messed up, and the photos are all messed up (and cannot be resited across hard page breaks).

    Do not update to version 3 !

  • http://bunsology.tumblr.com bunso

    I’ll try this notability app, but I have been using Ghostwriter Notes app from http://majorspot.com ever since. I just love the features of the app, plus I got a discount too!