Effectiveness and Usability of Stylized Notes for Electronic Textbooks in Tablet PC

The rise of smartphones and computer tablets has been shifting computer tasks to mobile applications. Educational environments are changing quickly as a generation of learners grows up with technologies such as tablets, smartphones and other smart devices. With the success of mobile textbook market, tablets are replacing paper textbooks to digital. Especially, one of the most important features of electronic textbooks application is creating and reading annotations. Most electronic book readers support this fundamental functionality. However, when an application moves from desktop pc to mobile device, its feature should be redefined to fit on a mobile device. Therefore, we propose a user interface which supports visualized annotation on touch-based tablets. It enables a user to gain additional information from annotation style and guide to navigate on useful resources. This interface is developed on a tablet device to evaluate it in a classroom study to prove its effectiveness. As a result, the proposing approach encouraged students to use the electronic textbooks and annotation feature in an efficient way.