There’s Got To Be A Better Way

Late last semester I had a bit of an epiphany.  I had no good answer to the question “Why am I using printed lecture notes during class?”

In my head, I started to think about my ideal replacement for paper lecture notes.  For some parts of some classes (and all parts of other classes), I still wanted to type up either complete lecture notes or at least type up a list of examples I wanted to use.  But there was no reason to then print out those typed notes and carry them around for months.  These papers were causing SO MUCH CLUTTER.  I can access all of my teaching files from the cloud anyway – why not reference my notes electronically while in class?  Well, a laptop is a pain to hold at the front of the room, or to carry around.  My phone screen is too small to comfortably read quickly in front of the judging eyes of 10-30 people.  But my tablet is handy, small, light, and ultra portable.  So maybe I could use that.

I asked my calculus students last April “Do any of your professors use tablets while they’re teaching?”  Most students said no, but a few said they recalled seeing one or two professors do such a thing, but not consistently for every class.  That was a shame.  It didn’t seem like there was anyone, at least locally, that would be able to offer advice on the best apps / best practices, or to provide cautionary tales.

Identifying the Requirements

What is the main advantage of paper?  You can write on it.  You can add notes.  I did this often, especially to remind myself of where I left off at the end of each class meeting.  Also, sometimes I encountered typos or broken examples, so I made notes to myself to fix those.  So I knew I needed an app that would allow me to annotate PDFs.

In addition, some examples (especially in my computer classes) get fleshed out by the students during the course of a lecture.  We build a model on the board and want to return to it in subsequent lectures.  Since I’m writing on the board and not taking notes, I have no record of this fleeting work.  BUT if I’m using my tablet, I would be able to take pictures of the chalkboard before I erase it, thereby preserving the model in a way that I can refer back to it in future lectures and not accidentally mis-remember what the students and I discussed.  This requires an app that allows me to sketch drawings (to recreate the boardwork electronically) and/or attach photos (if I remember to take a photo of the board before I erase it).

Ideally, all of this information would be stored in the same app.  For maximum convenience, I would also want to categorize each different class/subject into different “folders” or “notebooks” or whatever, but still in the same app.

Research and Testing Products

Last April and May I did a lot of Googling and reading articles and how-tos and product reviews.  I tried at least 5 different pdf annotation apps.  I don’t even remember them all now, because I installed them and removed them in under an hour.  None of them had convenient interfaces just for annotating pdfs, and none of them had the additional features I was looking for that would help me overlook the faults in that feature.  After trying a lot of different apps, I settled on the official Adobe Acrobat app as the only one that could easily and reliably annotate pdfs, and allow me to continue adding annotations at different times (during each class period) while still saving the old notes I’d made.

Even though the Adobe Acrobat app is amazing at everything pdf, it doesn’t have any of the additional features I was looking for.  (Or, if it did, I couldn’t figure out how to do it.  Which is just as bad as not being able to do it at all.)  So while I had started using the Adobe Acrobat app in class last April, I was still looking for a way to have pdfs AND notes AND drawings AND photos AND organization.

This fall I resigned myself to probably needing two different apps to get everything I wanted (Adobe Acrobat + something else).  As the beginning of the fall term grew near, I started Googling and reading up on “note-taking apps.”  Basically, Evernote and all of Evernote’s competition.  Evernote recently re-designed their entire subscription and feature structure.  When I tried it (after the re-design), I couldn’t find a way to upload/annotate pdfs on the free version, or to add drawings on top of notes.  (ie, It had the opposite problem from the pdf annotation apps I’d tried before – if there was a convoluted way to do it, it wasn’t worth investing the time in learning such an unintuitive process.)  I’m pretty sure I had the same problem with Microsoft’s OneNote.  Also, the amount of syncing and integrating it wants to do with Windows is a serious downside for me.  (Others might actually consider that a “must-have” but I hated it.  I don’t use Windows very often. I don’t want an app that tries to force me to use it more often, and I don’t want ANOTHER app that contributes to Windows’ resource hogging.)

Nothing really seemed to be what I wanted so I started this semester of teaching last week using a combination of Adobe Acrobat (for pdfs) and Evernote (for photos and sketches).

The Winner

Over the summer, I found myself in the basement working on my server, needing to take notes.  I didn’t have a pen and paper handy, but I did have my tablet within reach.  Unfortunately, I wanted to jot things down rather than type them on a touch-screen-keyboard.  So, I did a quick search for a sketching app and installed Squid.  I took my notes.  Everything was fine.  I never used the app again.

This morning, the app automatically updated (as all my apps are set to do), and it gave me a notification that it had updated (as all my apps are set to do).  But I noticed that the name of the app had changed from “Squid” to “Squid: Take notes, markup PDFs.”

Color me intrigued.

I opened the app for the first time in months and looked around.  I tapped the little + button in the bottom corner (now pretty standard in Android apps).  My options were “Import PDF” or “New note.”  I imported a set of lecture notes.  All of my old annotations were saved (thanks to the wonderful functionality of the Adobe Acrobat app).  And I could easily add notes, photos, sketches, etc.  I added a blank new note.  From the menu, I could “Add image” or “Export” as well as draw/write on it.  It also has the organizational functionality that people like about Evernote and OneNote.

PERFECT.  Easy to figure out.  (Easier than I remember from months ago, so that speaks to the recent work of their development team.)  Had all the features I wanted.  At one point, I selected something and it told me I had to subscribe to use that feature.  It’s only $6/year.  I’m so in love with it already, I signed up immediately.  Definitely worth $6.  I’d prefer it just be a $6 app rather than a subscription, but I can live with it.  And if it ever stops being useful, I’ll just stop paying.  But for now, I am so happy to finally have found what I was looking for.

I already taught my first class out of the Squid app this morning.  I could easily navigate my lecture notes, draw additional notes over my lecture notes pdf using my stylus, and attach a picture of a diagram I’d drawn on the board that I want to be able to recreate and reference in a future class.  Exactly what I had been looking for for months.

I know it’s only day 1 and maybe I should wait until I’ve used it longer to recommend it so strongly.  But for now I’m a happy customer.  If that changes, I will keep you updated.

For anyone else wondering if this will fit their needs, there are just two comments I will make about what seems to be lacking. First: Squid doesn’t seem to have syncing capabilities.  This is not a problem at all for me – I exclusively intend to use my tablet for teaching.  I don’t want to go back and forth between different devices.  But if you need multi-device syncing support, it is not obvious to me that it is possible in Squid.  However, exporting/sharing existing files is very easy.  So you would be able to back up files or relocate them if needed.  Bulk export is possible, and they support exporting as pdf or jpg or png.  And actually, now that I think about it, the documentation I read said something about connecting to Dropbox.  I’m not sure if that’s a one way connection or a two-way connection, but it might be possible to sync via Dropbox.  If that’s important to you, you should look into it.

Second: The interface for navigating between different pages while you’re in edit mode is kind of annoying. (Reading mode is perfectly intuitive, though.) Sometimes I forget I’m in edit mode and I try to switch pages or zoom in/out and just end up drawing a line over the page unintentionally.  It’s easy enough to hit the undo button (to delete the unintentional drawing/marking I made on the document), then go out of edit mode, then do what I was trying to do.  But that’s one way in which the app could improve, I guess.

Final verdict: the Squid app is amazing and has exactly all the features I want, and makes all of those tasks easy and intuitive to complete.  I think this is going to make a huge difference for me in the classroom this semester (and hopefully for many semesters to come).