My daughter is in college. She takes her laptop to class to take notes. This is becoming a problem for her because she is disabled and walks with crutches. Having such a heavy backpack throws off her gait and makes it hard to walk. She also has an Intrathecal Baclofen Pump which means a catheter line is implanted in her spine. This makes her nervous using a backpack (she’s had catheter problems with the pump before). So, she’s been going to class in her wheelchair instead of walking. Sitting so much gives her back pain, too, and she misses walking (which was her main source of excerise).
She wants to continue typing her notes since she is slow at handwriting (fine motor issues related to her disability), but we are looking for something lighter to carry. Years ago I had a classmate who used a PDA and fold-out keyboard to take classroom notes.
Does anyone here have experience with doing this? Does a PDA ( the one I saw had 32 MB storage) have a large enough capacity for a day’s worth of class notes?
For the first few years I was in college I used a PDA to take notes and it worked great. Mine had 64Mb of memory, but I don’t think that my notes ever took up even half of that over the whole semester (granted I am a sparse note taker). Taking a quick glance at some of the notes that I took on my PDA it looks like most of them are under 100Kb for a full semester (keep in mind that the file formats for my PDA, and I am assuming most PDAs, are much smaller than your typical Word file).
The only real trouble I ever had with it was in my science and math classes where diagrams were a big part of the notes and I found that drawing them on the PDA was difficult. Of course the fold out keyboard is a must, but once you have that it isn’t really any different than taking notes on a laptop.
I used a Palm Pilot with its native grafitti a few months and don’t think of that interface as a very realistic option for taking notes. I also played with some other devices that had the little keyboard, and found those so hard to use because of their size that they didn’t seem realistic either.
But I didn’t try foldout keyboards, and I don’t know how small and dexterious your daughter’s fingers are. I think memory size and feature set and interfacing to PCs and email are all probably more than good enough for taking notes in class.
I have used some pretty small laptop computers. I had a Toshiba about 10 years ago that was pretty reasonable to type on and smaller than most hardback books. Such laptops would be a great option to check.
I took notes in archives on an ancient Palm Pilot (Handspring, really) with a fold-out keyboard, and that was awesome-- could carry the stuff around in a biggish jacket pocket. The keyboard was actually a bit bigger/wider key layout than my laptop. Taking them by hand with the ‘graffiti’ handwriting recognition would be way too slow, however. The new machines I think can take things as word docs, and my current Palm Pilot talks to Endnote, which is great.
I’ve never done this myself but have seen at least one family with a kid who used that exact thing - PDA plus foldout keyboard.
Check on the keyboard setup - the newer Palms, IIRC, use their IR port to communicate with the keyboard, and that chews up batteries in both pieces (keyboard and Palm). Though if your daughter could get a seat near an electrical outlet that might solve that problem.
Graffiti (or even the built in “keyboard” on the touch screen layout) would probably not be a good choice. Too slow.
I’ve used a palm Vx and the folding keyboard for work, not school, but it worked great. One of the main benefits is the long battery life, though that may be a issue with color PDA screens that also by default need backlighting.
As pointed out above diagrams & symbols used in math and science may make this difficult to use.
She would be eligible for note-taking services, but doesn’t want to use them. She’s particular about note-taking and doesn’t trust other people to take them as she likes them.
Thanks everyone – especially for the model numbers. I’m heading to eBay now to see what I can find.