Taking notes on PDAs with shared text input

This paper presents a system designed to support note taking by students on wirelessly connected PDAs in a classroom. The system leverages the devices' wireless connectivity to allow students to share their notes in real time and quickly reuse words from their fellow note takers. In addition, presentation material such as Powerpoint slides is also extracted when presented by the instructor, giving students further means for reusing words. We describe the system and report our findings on an initial user study where the system was used for four months during a graduate level course.