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Note: The information on this page (including the attached PDF) was last updated in February 2014.

If you have an iPad, there are many applications you can use to supplement your note-taking and organization. The AzTechs downloaded and tested many of the most popular of these apps, both paid and free. You can find a summary of our favorites in the Accessibility Apps document. Also below are commonalities between apps of the same type. This page will be frequently updated as we continue our investigation into these and other apps.

If there is an app you think we should know about or that you would like us to test, please email us at aztechs@carleton.edu.

Note-Taking

These apps are great for taking notes in a classroom setting. Some of their capabilities include recording audio, handwritten and typed note support, diagram creation, and syncing across different platforms.

There are some standard features which all or most of these apps have. If there’s an app which doesn’t include one of these features, it is noted in the details about that app. These standard features include:

  • Palm rest and left-handed support
  • Syncing to various platforms including Dropbox, Google Drive, and email
  • Zooming in and automatically moving the text box across the page when handwriting
  • Ability to organize notes into notebooks
  • Exporting documents as PDFs (however, there is no form-filler option for PDFs on any of these apps)
  • Inserting photos

Organization

While these apps aren’t the best for taking notes in class, they have a variety of other options that are useful for general organization and scheduling purposes. These include to-do lists, brainstorming, and short memos.

Due to the varying nature of features that these apps offer, they do not all share specific options like the note-taking apps do. We recommend that you look at the PDF for more details, as they are actually quite different.

Other Apps

The three other categories we investigated were speech-to-text, presentation and annotation. Each category only has a couple of apps, so for the best summary of their features, we recommend looking at the PDF.