How Do You Capture Ideas Visually With The iPad?

By its very design, the iPad promotes consumption.

Essentially an interactive mobile screen, the combination of physical form and supporting software-based user interface on Apple’s wunder-tablet suggests watching and listening, enabling you to tear the “monitor” off the desk and take it with you.

By lacking a keyboard, input and production aren’t quite as natural. That isn’t necessarily because the iPad can’t accommodate such input, but rather that the software–and our habits as users–haven’t completely caught up with the not-insignificant shift in interface.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

One microcosm of the potential of the iPad in learning is the concept of visual recording.

Visual recording is what it sounds like it’d be. As opposed to recording audio, visual recording captures visuals, though not necessarily in photographic form. The process of visually capturing ideas with the iPad isn’t terribly complex in concept. If you can think of concept-mapping, you’re halfway there.

But executing it in practice–and then doing something meaningful with those iPad-captured images–isn’t second-nature simply because it’s not something you do everyday.

The following video does an excellent job of exploring this idea, answering the following questions:

1. What is visual recording?

2. What tools (and apps) are available to make it work?

3. What do you need to understand to be able to do it?

4. Post-production, what do you do with the recordings when you’ve finished?
It is also honest, offering the pros and cons of each app, and of the iPad itself in various learning domains.