iPad App Review: Pen Ultimate

penultimate icon

Is Pen Ultimate a notebook, or a digital whiteboard app? The answer is both. As a notebook or notepad replacement, Pen Ultimate sports extremely smooth handwritten text. Paired with a stylus, it’s likely the closest you can get to feeling like you are writing directly on your iPad. Pages are intuitively grouped into notebooks, that can be customized with different types of paper. Plug your iPad into a classroom projector cable and it transforms into a digital whiteboard.

penultimate image

Writing with this app is fairly straight forward. There is a pen with varying colors and widths, and an eraser. A new addition of a clipping tool makes it easy to circle things you have written or drawn and move them around on the paper. When using this app as a digital whiteboard, pages in your notebook act like new whiteboards and you can easily move backward and forward through your class notes. After class is over, you can easily save the days notes as a PDF file and email it out to students or post it on your bSpace course website.

Professor Herma Hill Kay, uses Pen Ultimate in her class as a digital whiteboard and has found that it has many advantages. Instead of using a stylus, she prefers her finger though. To read more about Professor Kay’s use of this app and an iPad in her course, click here.

Pen Ultimate does lack some of the features that other apps have, such as voice recording or editing PDF’s, but it’s simplicity is more of a strength than a weakness. It has a very low learning curve and does what it is supposed to do elegantly. We recommend Pen Ultimate for those looking to use the iPad as a notebook replacement or as a light-weight digital whiteboard. For more information about this app or about styli to use with it please contact us here at Instructional Technology.