First Pencast?

So what's a pencast? A pencast is a special kind of Flash movie made with a Pulse Smartpen. (http://www.livescribe.com)
When you write with a Smartpen every mark you make on the paper is recorded along with your audio comments. After making your recording you can play back any part of the audio by just touching the pen to the paper. The current market for these gadgets is student for use in notetaking.

Once a session is recorded, you can upload it to a special site on the Internet for you, anyone of your choice, or everyone to view. That's a pencast. It includes both the writing and audio, but it's further enhanced as you'll see. We'll be using pencasts for homework help and for other purposes.

Note: If you don't see the image referred to below it probably means that you don't have the Flash 9.0 or higher player installed.
That's what the opening pop-up alert was all about.

To show you how it works I've linked to an hilarious pencast by Mr. Disaster, whoever he is. There's a lot more like this on the Livescribe website.

Notice in the image below, (NO CLICKING YET PLEASE) that some of the text and sketches are black and other parts are green. The black part was drawn by Mr. Disaster before he started recording the audio. That part will stay just as it is.
The green part is what he drew as he made the audio recording.
Let's see how it works.

1. Click the Play button () and listen for a while.        Wow, it's Mr. Rogers' alter-ego!
2. Click the Pause button ().
   As soon as play started, the green all changed to grey. But as the audio played, the grey gradually changed back to green. This shows you what parts you've heard so far and what lies ahead.
3. Now try moving your mouse over the pencast. You'll see a red circle when you go over the grey or green parts. If you click when the circle appears you'll hear the audio starting at that point in the discussion and see the drawing start from that point too. So you can easily move forward and backward to hear just the parts you need. You can use the slider at the bottom to do the same thing.
4. Try jumping around the recording. See if you can find the part where Yoda was introduced.
5. Now see if you can jump ahead to hear the voice of the "small dumpy robot."
6. This step will make these instructions disappear, so read the rest of this item (#6) before you click.
   Clicking on the grey circle with the arrow in it at the top right corner of the image () will change the movie to full screen.
   Clicking on the similar pair of arrows at the top right corner of the large image () will revert to the small size.
   You'll usually want to use the full-screen version to watch pencasts.
7. A sample homework help pencast is found at the bottom of this page. Sorry. I'll try to learn to do the alter-Rogers voice.

Here's a problem from Chapter 2

A car is traveling at a constant speed of [24.8] m/s on a highway. At the instant this car passes an entrance ramp, a second car enters the highway from the ramp. The second car starts from rest and has a constant acceleration. What acceleration must it maintain, so that the two cars meet for the first time at the next exit, which is 1.8 km away?