Styluses for academic use

There are many stylus out there for editing documents and hand writing on the iPad – Amazon UK lists no fewer than 112 products. Joachim at academiPad recommends the Adonit Jot Pro Touch stylus which he ranked first for precision of hand writing. On Amazon UK you can get it for £24.99. The stylus has a ball point and a transparent disk in lieu of the rubber nib (for added precision).
Macworld recently ran an exhaustive review of iPad styluses to include the Adonit Jot. Their review is broken down by pen type, I.e. Nib (rubber) styluses, multifunction stylus (typically they incorporate a real pen to write on paper and other functionalities) and unconventional styluses. In their review the Adonit Jot Pro does not perform badly either so it sounds like it could be a very safe investment. Check Macworld’s review here and click on the pen’s name for the full review. A nice round up of the best styluses is also available with a few runners up.

Something to bear in mind if you start hand writing in your iPad….
An important limitation of annotations created through hand writing is that your resulting notes won’t be searchable, unlike annotations entered using the keyboard. So if you use your atylus to edit a PDF handout using Good Reader, you wont be able to search through your own notes. But if (like me) you become addicted to Evernote, you will benefit from their clever OCR technology which enables for indexing hand writing notes and searching within them. And following Evernote’s acquisition of Penultimate, you can now sketch notes and diagrams on your iPad using a stylus and save them to Evernote for easy retrieval and searching. Download Penultimate for free and check the video here to find out why your stylus + Penultimate + Evernote = marriage in heaven..!

Projecting directly from your iPad

Below is the link to the VGA cable I used to project directly from my iPad. It is a standard iPad Dock Connector to VGA Adaptor, retailing at Amazon for £12.67