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)

Moving maths online - Tutorials in 301

In moving the university online very suddenly, finding new ways for learning and teaching mathematics has been challenging and interesting. Hope Thackray works in the Maths and Statistics Help Service (MASH) and Jenny Hughes is an ex maths teacher who joined the digital learning team in March (the same week the university moved online!). Together we’ve been sharing ideas and testing out tools. This is a series of blog posts about some of the things we’ve tried.

The first is from Hope about the experience of running tutorials in 301.

Tutorials

The sudden shift from face-to-face to online meant that overnight, online teaching became a real (and daunting!) thing. This meant finding a way to change lectures, tutorials, seminars and 1-1 meetings into something which would work well for both the students and staff. Lectures were easy enough to fill the immediate gap, with most lecturers having previous versions of lectures available thanks to Encore, but anything smaller than that needed to have that interactive element between student and staff.

It became clear Blackboard Collaborate was suddenly the saviour of the online teaching problem, especially for us in 301. For 1-1s, staff and students alike could use the sharing features to take pictures of maths problems or draw on the interactive whiteboard. Since I had an iPad and Apple pencil, this was really useful for going through problems with the whole group. It wasn’t perfect but with it we found a whole new cohort of students who liked the privacy and flexibility that online learning gave them. They didn’t need to leave the house and find the building, and could ask difficult questions about their work without leaving the comfort of their own homes. 

Similarly, tutorial-style sessions, such as 301’s workshops, could be adapted to work within the Blackboard Collaborate environment. It was very quickly clear that the larger the student group, the harder it was to get a good flow of input from both the person leading the session and the students themselves. Anything beyond a ratio between staff members and students of about 1:8 meant that students were more unlikely to join in with conversation, whether using the microphone or on the chat. Similarly, if the students were resorting to using the in-built chat function, it would be a case of having to look out for both questions asked audibly and through the chat, which is very difficult to manage with one staff member alone.

Thankfully, Blackboard Collaborate’s Breakout groups function came in extremely handy for splitting up large groups of students into more manageable sizes. The groups could be either used to target specific problem areas (such as in the case of revision sessions) or just to make sure each group was sufficiently small to facilitate proper discussion. Once in the groups, students were automatically able to share content and discussions between others only within that group. The polling function was great for seeing where students' attention should be focussed (for example suggesting two different topics for revision and seeing which one students preferred).

Blackboard Annotate - New Features to Support Marking in Blackboard

In August (between 10th - 14th) the Blackboard Assignment tool will undertake a change to enhance its feedback functionality known as Blackboard Annotate. This update will require no downtime and the tools can be continued to be used as normal whilst the migration happens.