As part of my masters program I formulated the idea I wanted to pursue for my doctorate degree...using science notebooks to improve science literacy in the elementary classroom! Now, that I have been involved in this iPad 2 project I am starting to realize that it seems unrealistic for me to ask my students to use paper and pencil journals for this component. This issue was also brought up by Gail the other day as she mentioned one possible alternative for her English notebooks--iDiary.
I took a look at this app today and found it very nice. The full version offers much more than the free version and I can see this replacing the journals for warm-ups very easily. Perhaps the best feature is that you can email your teacher the warm-ups for evaluating/assessing/informing/etc! Love it! It worked like a charm---I emailed myself a page from my mock journal and it looked great on my PC!
The only problem I see right now for science is the fact that you can't include charts and graphs unless you manually create them. And without a stylus this is difficult to make it look nice. Draw Pad has a variety of papers such as blank, small graph, and large graph; however, once again a stylus is a must. I also dislike that the writing tool doesn't go very thick. I tried to graph something like F(x)= 2/3x + 4 and found that the dots were too small and I had to virtually draw a small circle. It would be nice to find an app that does what both of these apps together!
Another app I looked at was iJournal--for some reason I deleted it...apparently I decided it wasn't very useful.
I will keep looking.
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