Fly Pen by Leapfrog

I have braved the crowds today and purchased a Fly pen by Leapfrog. I am planning on field testing the device in several grade level classrooms and with individual students. I am curious to find out if such a device can make a difference for struggling students and be a great tool of digitizing student created content easier and faster. Recently I have read the following quote:

Walk with a pen or fly with a computer.

I wonder if that one has to be amended?

I get to play with it here at home this weekend to familiarize myself with it. The pen comes with a notebook of special paper that is needed to write with the pen. You have to twist the top of the pen to have the pen tip emerge. Then just start writing on the paper. To start out with I do not have the best handwriting in the world, but in addition I learned to write in Germany, so my cursive letters are a little different than the ones taught here in the US. I wondered if the software would be able to recognize and “translate” my writing successfully.

In order to upload your notebook to the computer you will need to install the PC based software (As far as I could tell there is not MAC version out yet). Since I am trying the pen out at home, I only registered the pen as a guest. A little odd is the disclaimer that one has to check off in order to proceed with the registration:

By checking the box, I agree that this account and my use of the Fly World application are subject tot the Fly World Terms of Service and Privacy Policy found at FlyWorld.com/terms and may result in LeapFrog collecting, storing, and processing information about me in the United States.

It made me a uneasy about continuing and I will have to check further into this at the LeapFrog site.

Once you are in the Fly control panel, the page I wrote was automatically updated, just like a scanned in page of paper. It highlighted several buttons on the right side, making it possible to print the page, save the page as an image or open as a document in Microsoft Word. I hope there will not be a problem with Word 2007 (the version we have at school).

Here is the first result, after I “Opened as Document” and it got imported into Word:

Second try writing urtlu this new Fey Pen.

? braved the Black Friday crowds and faught ‘my way to Best buy.

I am really interested to find out if it is capable of recognizing my german-style cursive,

How do graphics or illustrations turn out? \,.

ago Or

*-son

Letts plnq the USB poe Lord in and find act.

I guess my handwriting is not the best, but then again so are not the ones of most struggling students. I will have to experiment a little more with the writing. I tried to use the “Image Selection” button and only create a separate image of the stick figures I drew , but even after selecting only the small area, it did saved the entire page as a .jpg.

If you are using or planning on using the Fly Pen, let me know of successful usage in the classroom.