Moving maths online - Handwriting in the digital world

In the last post Hope talked about tutorials. Todays post is from Jenny looking at how to deal with handwriting in teaching. 

The problem

One of the frustrating things about moving online is that for most people a lot of maths is done with a pencil and paper or by showing students your thinking on a board. That doesn’t neatly translate to the online world. With everyone stuck at home it’s been a case of making do with things that you’ve already got. That includes the digital learning team, we can only test out things that we have access to which can be frustrating.

Graphic tablets

I’m lucky enough that I had a graphic tablet (it’s a Wacom Intuos small) which is great and I use it instead of a mouse as it connects to my laptop via bluetooth. People have their own favourites. There's lots out there and they go up to silly money. I chatted to a graphic designer about what she had saved from her office to bring home, she’d only brought the small one with no regrets. The biggest challenge though was what to actually use it with when presenting. The Blackboard Collaborate white board and tools for feedback on work are a bit clunky . They’ve been listening though and it’s getting a really good upgrade ready for September 2020 (have a look at Toms post here). Until then or if it's going to be a video rather than live then there are a few University supported options. I tested out loads of things with varying results. All have some problems, Smart notebook has an annoying watermark, Powerpoint doesn’t let you erase or go back to slides, Jam board seemed to make my writing even worse than normal. One of the unexpectedly great tools to come out of my playing around with things is Adobe Acrobat. If you’ve got slides or worksheets that can be made into a PDF the annotation tools are great and this became my favourite for recording with Kaltura.

DIY visualisers

While a few people have graphic tablets for a lot of people a more DIY approach of making a visualiser can work with what you've already got. When I taught in a college this was my favourite piece of tech because I could demonstrate or stick students work underneath quickly. With a phone, tablet or web cam it’s possible to make a type of visualiser to write and draw under. As someone in a session for the faculty of science put it OHPs worked well and this is just an update. In Kaltura you can have your slides up and change the webcam so students can see you handwriting the solutions instead of seeing you talking. Once it is uploaded students can switch views to see both or just one at a time. Blackboard Collaborate even introduced a new feature recently to connect a webcam in addition to your standard camera which works well for live session. My webcam is one I found in our box of unloved tech and cables, they are about £20 online now so not an especially good one but it works well. There was a lot of rearranging desks to try out different solutions, my webcam sits on a cardboard box. My desk is in front of the window and there was too much light which was quite variable so this helps keep it controlled. There are more professional versions available if you search for mini photography studios.

You can see some of the setups and advice as well as how a graphic tablet can be used to annotate, draw and write.  (https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/apse/digital/coronavirus/handwritten)