PressurePen stylus for iPad makes drawing on your tablet less bothersome

Drawing on your iPad, as many of us have sadly discovered, is not as easy as the TV commercials make it appear. Especially if you’ve worn out the screen a bit with usage and it needs to be calibrated every few days to keep it working smoothly. Most of have end up using rubber coated matchsticks or other homemade pointing devices to serve as styli for the must-have tablet though some of us do end up purchasing as-seen-on-TV products too that end up scratching our iPad screen beyond repair. For those us that aren’t blessed with the resources to keep buying these tablets every few months or replacing their screens with the help of tech wizardry, Charles Mangin, web developer extraordinaire and noted hardware "artiste," PressurePen is a cool new stylus made especially for the iPad that delivers you from all your stylus woes once and for all.

The unseemly looking PressurePen cones fitted with an audio-signal producing heart that lets your iPad’s screen discover how hard you’re pressing down on your stylus so your iPad can, via the audio jack of course, sense whether to draw a deeper or a lighter line. The PressurePen is designed to deliver over 1000 levels of pressure information to the iPad via the audio signal which makes it one of the finest drawing tools out there in the market today. For now, the PressurePen is available via the tinkerer’s Kickstarter projecting, pledging a fund to which will get you one of the first shipments of the product.

To get the PressurePen in a DIY kit form (where you can print your own 3D body shell and tinker with the open source software to customize the stylus to your own needs) you will need to pledge $30 towards the $10,000 fundraising goal before May 31st or pledge $60 to get a fully assembled, ready to run PressurePen whenever it is ready for production. Via: Technabob/ Kickstarter

Goodbye to books,iPads in China school

Students in a Chinese school may soon carry iPads instead of books to their classrooms as the management is planning to allow the use of the gadget.

The Jinling High School in Nanjing city has already allowed three students to bring iPads to their classrooms on a trial basis once their new term begins in September.

The policy has been discussed extensively and will possibly be extended to all students, the management said.

The iPads can set students free from the burden of carrying school bags, said Xin Qihua, vice director of the school's international department.

It can also improve interaction between the students and teachers who can ask questions through the device and review all answers from the students immediately, said Xin.

The gadget can also give students access to foreign educational resources, which will contribute to their preparation for the SAT, TOFEL and AP exams, Xin added.

It can also help save up to 90 percent of their expenditures on teaching materials.

The measure was hailed by many young people. "I am so jealous. I have an iPad too, but I am not allowed to take it to the classroom," said a blogger on Sina Weibo.

However, some expressed doubt. They worry that the gadget may spoil the students.

"Although it is worth trying, children who lack self-discipline may waste time in playing games," Xinhua quoted another blogger as saying.

"The teacher has technical control over all the iPads, and students will be prevented from installing any games," Meng Qun, a teacher at the school, as saying.

To lighten the load on students in primary and high schools, local governments have been pondering the idea sometime whether to allow students to use devices like laptops.

However, Yin Fei, professor with Nanjing Normal University, said: "It is a fallacy to reduce students' burdens by introducing electronic devices.

"The excessive burden on students' shoulders is not from the weight of school bags, but the flawed educational system itself."