Notability on the iPad

We are hoping that Notability becomes a key app for both students and teachers on their iPads to use for taking text and visual notes as well as storing, organizing and annotating class handouts, presentations, etc. We also hope that teachers will use this app in conjunction with Air Server, their MacBooks and classroom projectors to use as a mobile interactive whiteboard.

When you first open Notability you will see the following screen, with your notes on the right hand side and any subject folders you make on the left hand side:

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Tap the + icon in the top left to create new subject folders to organize and store your notes:

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Any notes you have already created can be dragged and dropped between subjects.

To create a new note tap the pen and paper icon in the top right hand corner. When you have a note open you can use two fingers to scroll and pinch to zoom in and out. The different tools can be seen across the top of the app including text entry, a pen for drawing, a highlighter and an eraser:

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Tap on a tool twice to see any additional options. You can also tap on the + icon to insert other objects like photos, web clips (screenshots of a webpage) and sticky notes:

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Once these have been added you can annotate over the top of them, you just need to tap somewhere else on the screen to deselect them. If you need to select and move one of these objects later on you need to use the text tool and just tap the object.

In addition to building up notes with these tools, Notability also offers powerful importing tools and can link to a number of cloud storage services. On the opening screen tap the import button and then tap Google Drive to link your school Google Drive account:

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You just need to login and tap Accept. You can now import all kinds of documents including PDFs, images and Microsoft Office files from Google Drive. Notability will turn them into notes which you can then view and annotate over the top of.

Once you have finished annotating you can also export the file back to Google Drive, just tap the export button and tap Google Drive again:

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One thing to note with exporting is that if you export the same file back to the same location in Google Drive it will overwrite the original. So if you want to save the originals and your students’ annotations you will need to create some kind of folder structure to save the separate files.

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