Taking notes together: Augmenting note taking

Abstract

Sufficient tools for students with learning disabilities and attention deficit disorder have not yet been established. We believe that the current tools these students can use call for a drastic change in traditional learning paradigms by either the instructor or the pupil. To fill this gap, we propose our tool, taking notes together (TNT), as a collaborative note taking tool that will help in equalizing the classroom for students with disabilities. This tool allows students to collaboratively tag classroom lecture/discussion in real time through synchronized transcription and audio recording. TNT provides a visualization that highlights the important classroom points and we argue facilitates better recall and a deeper understanding of the classroom material. Through our evaluation we were able to prove that all students can benefit from this tool. We also present a case study of one student with ADD and how they benefited. The tool makes the learning experience, particularly for students with special needs like LD and ADD, less stressful while still being active in the note-taking.