Smart note: Student-centered multimedia active reading tools for tablet textbooks

Abstract

Active reading is a fundamental task for the study experience, yet existing tablet textbook platforms fail to provide the wide range of flexibility required for active reading, particularly when multimedia content is included. To address this, we propose SMART Note, a set of active reading tools that provides learners with novel annotation and reorganization methods intended to better support active reading in the tablet environment. In an evaluation study with SMART Note prototypes, users had high success rates with usability inspection tasks and rated novel annotation and reorganization tools more favorably than tools offered by most existing tablet textbook platforms. Our work builds a foundation for future research that explores how SMART Note affects active reading and learning with multimedia tablet textbooks. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.