Tag: handwriting

Teaching From Home (TFH): Writing on a Tablet

No matter what we teach, many of us make use of handwriting when in the classroom. We write on a whiteboard/blackboard, or write on handouts using a document camera, or write on slides being project on a screen. Writing helps guide learners toward the ideas that you consider important, and it helps organize thought processes and discussions. Plus, it lets you do something with your hands besides fidget.

When teaching online, there are lots of ways to approximate the benefits of writing without a stylus. Instead of a whiteboard, for example, you could have a Google Doc that learners can follow along with or even contribute to. But many of us need the flexibility of handwritten words and drawn diagrams. For that I suggest using a tablet (in my case, an iPad).

The two main decisions you have to make when using a tablet are:

  1. What app should I use to write?
  2. How should I project?

In this post I’m going to outline these choices and your options. I’ll try to describe the pros and cons of each option, and articulate why I do things the way I do.

Question 1: What app should I use to write?

There is no shortage of apps for the iPad that allow you to write or draw. With the advent of the Apple Pencil (a tool I highly encourage you to use in lieu of a traditional chunky stylus, provided that your iPad supports it), writing on an iPad has reached new levels of ease and comfort. So which app should you use?

When deciding which app is best for you, I prefer apps that have a “presenter mode” – that is to say, when the iPad is projecting onto an external screen, the app’s UI and other apps on the screen are hidden from the external screen (see my old post on Keynote for examples). This is especially useful for teachers, since it (a) ensures that the students only focus on your content and not the details, and (b) allows you to have additional reference material on your iPad that students don’t see.

I’m going to go through the most popular options below. Each of these has its own type of presenter mode that you should experiment with:

  1. PowerPoint (.pptx): The People’s Choice. If you use slides in your class, there’s a very good chance that they’re PowerPoint slides.
  2. Keynote (.key): For the Aesthetically Minded. Keynote has, in my opinion, an unparalleled ability to animate and show context.
  3. GoodNotes (.pdf): Flexibility and Power. If you prefer a blank whiteboard, or use Beamer, or like to zoom in and out, or simply like to write a lot, PDF annotation apps are nimble in ways that more traditional slideshow apps are not. There are many options out there, though the two most popular are GoodNotes and Notability. I used to not recommend Notability for teaching because it lacked a presenter mode, but the developers have finally added it (just a week ago at time of writing). My love for GoodNotes is no secret, so I’ll focus on that in this post, but Notability seems to be roughly the same in terms of features for our purposes.

Let’s take a look at how each performs, both in terms of handwriting and presenter mode.

Writing/Drawing

  • PowerPoint: Not great, but not bad either. A very basic set of colored pens, highlighters, and erasers, with no ability to adjust the thickness or use other colors. The pens aren’t especially “realistic” feeling either. One feature of note: when you exit a presentation that you’ve been writing on, it asks if you want to keep your annotations. If you tap “Keep”, they become embedded in the slides as shapes.
  • Keynote: Truly terrible. A couple of colors, zero ability to adjust thickness. Heck, you can’t even erase (just undo)! Writing on Keynote feels clunky and fragile; if you stop presenting your slideshow, you lose all annotations that you had made. All of that despite the fact that iOS has a built-in handwriting engine that works wonderfully. Sigh.
  • GoodNotes: Exquisite! Infinitely customizable pens and highlighters; a customizable eraser that can automatically snap back to your previous pen after you use it; shape recognition; and a lasso tool to move handwriting around. If you plan on writing a lot and want precision and flexibility, GoodNotes is the way to go.

Presenter mode

For each screenshot, I tried to show as much information as each app’s presenter mode allows:

  • PowerPoint: Solid! Shows your current slide, presenter notes, and thumbnails for your presentation. There’s also a button to black out the screen if needed, and the ability to zoom in and out of slides.
  • Keynote: Lots of customizations in terms of seeing the current and/or next slide, presenter notes, current time/elapsed time, and thumbnails.
  • GoodNotes: In addition to hiding the UI, GoodNotes allows you to either mirror the each full page (similar to a full slide in PowerPoint or Keynote), or zoom in and out of your slides (“Mirror Presenter Page”). You can get to thumbnails etc., but you have to tap the four squares in the top left corner to access a grid of thumbnails.

Question 2: How should I project?

Zoom offers three ways to project from your iPad, two using the Desktop client and one from the iPad itself. I’ll say now that I don’t recommend projecting from the iPad itself. It will turn your iPad into its own “Participant” in your Zoom room, which complicates how you interact with your students (e.g., it’ll get assigned to a Breakout Room if you use those). The stream itself is also of lower quality in my experience. So, onto the Desktop options:

Option 1: Plug your iPad in directly. The advantage of this method is that it’s easy. Plug your iPad directly into your computer, click “Share Screen” in Zoom, and click “iPhone/iPad via cable”. You may have to enter your iPad password the first time, but then you’re all set! Your iPad is being mirrored to your computer and to your students.

Option 2: Airplay from your iPad. The downside to Option 1 is that it doesn’t take advantage of presenter mode. That is to say, whatever is happening on your iPad is being mirrored entirely to your students. Option 2, however, will use the presenter modes that I mentioned earlier in this post. For example, here’s what I see versus what students see in Keynote when using Airplay:

The downside, though, is that projecting is a two step process. After clicking “Share Screen” and “iPhone/iPad via Airplay” in Zoom, you then have to go into your iPad’s control center, select “Screen Mirroring” and connect to your computer:

If you’re comfortable with these steps, I recommend Option 2, but only if presenter mode is especially useful to you.

[UPDATE July 9 2020] Option 3 (Keynote only): Project from your Mac and annotate with your iPad. Keynote has long had the ability to remote control/annotate on slides playing from one device using another device. This means that you can run a Keynote presentation from your Mac then, using your iPad as a remote control, annotate on the slides. I used to not suggest this approach because Keynote on the Mac took over all monitors while a presentation was running. However, as of Keynote version 10.1, you can now choose “Play Slideshow in Window” to have Keynote run as a standalone window on your Mac. If you use Keynote as your primary way of presenting, this is now the setup that I recommend.

What I Use

So what am I using when teaching on Zoom? I use Airplay Mirroring (Option 2) with both GoodNotes and Zoom.

In class, I show two screens to students, one showing a handout in GoodNotes (that they also have) and one showing supplementary screens in Keynote for animations. While online teaching, I’m learning that projecting two screens onto students small laptops is not a great learning experience, so instead I’ll be switching between them manually. iPad makes it easy to quickly switch between apps, and it looks pretty seamless from the student’s perspective as long as I’m using Airplay Mirroring:

There’s of course a lot to consider here, but in the end I suggest you pick the app that you’re most comfortable with and work from there. It’s possible to make any of these combinations work – what matters is that you feel comfortable with the setup you choose so that you can focus on teaching.

Teaching from Home (TFH): Hardware

First, to whoever is reading this: I hope this finds you safe, healthy, and (relatively) happy.

While this is very far from the first thing on folks’ minds, I’ve received a lot of feedback on my online teaching setup and online teaching strategy, and thought I should share my ongoing process of adapting to an online environment.

I’m lucky to have some experience teaching online as one of the faculty leads for the Kennedy School’s Public Leadership Credential. In addition, I’m a big advocate of blended learning both in my residential courses and in my work training policymakers abroad. Much of this work is a combination of synchronous and asynchronous content. For now, I’ll be focusing these posts on delivering content synchronously using Zoom.

This first post will be about my tech setup when teaching online, and tips to ensure that it goes smoothly. Subsequent posts will be about pedagogical choices, but I thought it better to break them up rather than publishing an online novel.

My online teaching setup at home

Here’s an image of my current setup:

And here are the details (with lots of links), and why I think they’re important:

  • Ethernet: None of your teaching matters if students can’t see or hear it. Having a stable internet connection is absolutely critical. WiFi can work, but make absolutely sure you have a good connection where you’re sitting. I prefer physically wiring my computer via Ethernet.
  • Two monitors: I connect my laptop to my LG UltraFine display and keep both of them on. For my purposes this is vastly better than a a single screen, simply because there’s a lot going on during a Zoom session: I’m sharing a presentation, I’m looking at my students’ video feeds, I’m monitoring the Participants list for raised hands, and I’m checking in on the chat (I know, this is a lot. More on this in a subsequent post). Luckily, Zoom has a dual monitor mode that lets you make use of both screens to display all of this. I like to keep my shared screen on the smaller laptop screen, and students’ faces/raised hands/chat front and center on the large screen.
  • An iPad: If you’ve read this site before, you know that I really enjoy teaching and recording from my iPad. This is especially true when teaching online. In addition to the annotation capabilities of the iPad, projecting from my iPad instead of sharing a presentation from my computer allows me to keep the shared screen in Zoom confined to a single window; otherwise apps like Keynote or PowerPoint will take over both screens to show you a presenter view. To project I use Zoom’s iOS Screen Sharing function. You can either connect the iPad physically to your computer (easier, more stable) or Airplay to it (more finicky, but lets you keep a “Presenter View” on your iPad while projecting the presentation to students). I tend to use Airplay since I like using Keynote’s presenter capabilities without students seeing them.1
  • Headphones: I cannot stress this enough: use headphones. If you use your computer speakers, there’s the risk of a feedback loop where your voice comes out of the speakers and back into the microphone ad infinitum. Zoom and other applications try to prevent this via software, but you’re better off removing this possibility.
  • Microphone: Your laptop microphone is probably fine (though you should check to make sure that it is). That said, if you happen to have an external microphone it can really help your audio quality which students will appreciate. I use a Blue Yeti which I have mixed feelings about, but which gets the job done.
  • Webcam: Your computer’s built-in one is fine, but I’m putting this here to stress that you should look into the camera as much as possible when teaching (this can be easy to forget when you have a laptop, since the webcam is below eye level. You’ll naturally want to look at your content or somewhere else, but the last thing your students want is to stare at your chin for 75 minutes.
  • Lighting: The general advice is to not have bright lights behind you, and to instead keep a consistent light source in front of you (behind your monitor). Experiment with different positions and see how they look.

Of course, don’t forget your water and espresso:

Phew! That’s enough for today. Please let me know in the comments if you have any suggestions. My  next post will be about my thinking with respect to running online sessions.

Stay safe!

  1. Note that you could also use an iPhone or other device as a secondary remote control for your presentation, but I digress. ↩︎

Mac Power Users #319

This week I was on Mac Power Users to talk about my workflows related to teaching and academic research. I’m a huge fan of MPU so it was quite an honor to be on.

Have a listen – feedback always welcome.

Mac Power Users #319: Teaching Workflows with Teddy Svoronos

In Praise of GoodNotes

Note: I have no affiliation whatsoever with the developers of GoodNotes, nor do I receive any compensation from them. I just really, really like their app. 

I do 99% of my teaching with an iPad that’s projected onto a screen, via an Apple TV or wired connection. I often get asked about the different apps that I use and what they do. Luckily, the list is very short: Keynote and GoodNotes.

I have written about Keynote a whole lot, but the truth is that I use GoodNotes much, much more. In fact, after using every PDF-based handwriting app that I could find[1], I’ve come to believe that GoodNotes is an essential, best in its class app that every student and teacher should own.

Before continuing, two notes:

First, my teaching style revolves around handouts with lots of blank space that I print out and distribute to students. I then annotate a PDF version of the handout on my iPad. This strikes a nice balance between the structure of slides and the freedom of whiteboards, and encourages student participation without forcing them to constantly scribble down notes. While I think GoodNotes is useful for a number of different situations, this is the primary use that I’ll discuss in this post.

Second, there are two ways to annotate a PDF: by selecting and highlighting text (as Adobe Reader or Preview allow on the Mac), and by drawing on PDFs as though they’re images. Here’s an image showing the difference between the two, selecting text on the left using PDF Expert, and drawing a highlight on the right using GoodNotes:

Highlighting vs Drawing
I use the former when reading and annotating articles, since highlighting the actual text allows me to tabulate and share all the text that I highlight (more on this later), and the latter when teaching, since I’m more interested in writing and drawing than selecting text. GoodNotes excels at drawing on PDFs, but doesn’t do highlighting of text and commenting the way Adobe Reader does. For that, I highly recommend PDF Expert.

With all of that said, let’s get into what makes GoodNotes so great.

Presentation View

The single biggest thing I think about when planning to teach is how to keep students focused on the content and not the million distractors that can commandeer their attention. So, if students see this when I’m trying to teach, there’s a problem:

GoodNotes Interface
Which color is he going to use? What do all those icons represent? He’s using an Apple Pencil??

Thankfully, the developer of GoodNotes understands this issue and addresses it very well. In addition to only showing the document that’s being annotated, the “lock” icon in the top right of the screen lets me lock the external display to a portion of the document, allowing me to do whatever I need to do elsewhere. Here’s what the students see versus what I see (the arrow pointing to the lock was added by me):

Projected screen
I can’t count the number of times the lock function has been crucial. It allows me to zoom in to precisely draw a portion of a graph (either by pinching to zoom or using the zoom window) while the students see the whole graph, and it allows me to zoom out and get a sense of where we are in the document while keeping students focused on a particular problem. A well implemented presenter view is sorely lacking in other apps that I’ve tried, and is the biggest reason why I keep coming back to GoodNotes.

Useful Handwriting Recognition

GoodNotes has a handwriting engine powered by MyScript which, in my experience, is incredibly accurate.

Handwriting
But many apps do handwriting recognition, most famously Evernote but also OneNote. In GoodNotes and these other two services, searching for text within the app will give you a list of results that include recognized text. Very handy, but GoodNotes improves on these services in two ways:

  1. Evernote and OneNote do server-side handwriting recognition, which means you need an internet connection and there will be a delay in recognition – something that’s been particularly noticeable with Evernote in my experience. All of GoodNotes’ recognition is local to your machine and almost instantaneous.
  2. You can select a portion of your handwriting and tap “Convert” in the context menu to get just that text, which can then be shared, as shown in the image above.
  3. This is the big one: when exporting a PDF from GoodNotes, your recognized handwriting gets embedded in the shared PDF. This makes your written text not only searchable, but selectable in apps like PDF Expert. Plus, your searchable notes can be quickly shared to any service you’d like – including Evernote and OneNote.

I personally feel that the GoodNotes developer should play up these features more, particularly #3. As services increasingly use proprietary formats to include cool features, GoodNotes is towing the line of openness and exportability.

Thoughtful Details

To me, presenter view and handwriting recognition are the big wins for GoodNotes. But the more I use the app, the more I notice delightful details that make for an exceptional experience. Here are just a few.

  • The eraser can be configured to automatically deselect after being used once. This is a huge time saver, especially when I also set it to erase entire strokes – quickly get rid of mistakes and move on.
  • The shape recognition button turns your strokes into straight lines and shapes; great for creating graph axes and lines on the go.
  • Once you insert an image, you can tap and hold it to crop, rotate, or move it. When students are working on problems together, I’ll often snap a photo of a particularly well done solution, crop it, and insert it onto the PDF.
  • When typing text, the words show up on an external screen in real time, as opposed to when you’ve deselected the text box. When doing stuff on my iPad, it’s important that the students see some visual indication of what’s going on, and this is a big help.

These features add up fast, especially in a teaching environment where small delays and niggles can throw you off and get in the way of learning.

Tangent: The Apple Pencil

GoodNotes supports every Bluetooth stylus that I’ve ever encountered – and I’ve encountered a lot[2]. The developer also keeps up on all the updated SDKs as these companies develop them, which is more than I can say for most handwriting apps. I’ve tried all of them, and always went back to a passive stylus, until now.

The Apple Pencil on the iPad Pro is a revelation for the kind of work that I do. The level of precision coupled with flawless palm rejection is truly amazing. GoodNotes’ support for the Pencil is perfect, and only furthers my love for the app.

Let Me Count The Ways

In short, GoodNotes has defined my experience as a graduate student and teacher attempting to leverage technology. I’ve been grateful to have it for my entire career as a graduate student, but its progress over the years has been remarkable, and I wish I had it in its current form back when I was starting.

Just go get it, ok?

App Link: GoodNotes

  1. Notability, Noteshelf, UPAD, ZoomNotes, Notes Plus, Note Taker HD, GoodReader, OneNote, PDF Expert, and Noterize, to name only a few.  ↩
  2. At the time writing: styluses by Adonit, styluses by Wacom, the Pogo Connect, and FiftyThree’s Pencil  ↩

Increasingly Irrelevant Distinctions

When I started graduate school a few years ago, I was terribly concerned about my notetaking setup (in retrospect, I should have been more concerned about statistics). I was about to get hammered by information that took a variety of forms: lots of equations and diagrams, but also enough discussion-oriented material to require flexibility in how I took notes. My main candidates, which I used to varying degrees, were:

  • Notes taken on my iPad, a combination of handwritten (with a stylus) and typed[1];
  • Typing notes using MultiMarkdown, to allow for easily formatted text, equations, footnotes, and other wacky content;
  • Going whole hog and taking notes in LaTeX in real time (using TeXpad on Mac or iOS);
  • Handwriting my notes with a pen, in a notebook made of paper. Probably by candlelight or gas lantern.

I ended up with a combination of these, depending on the course and whatever devices I had available. This caused quite a bit of consternation in my workflow-addled brain. What if I needed an equation and couldn’t find it? What if I had different silos of material that adhered to different organizational systems? Won’t somebody please think of the metadata?

Looking back on my 2+ years of notes (which I actually refer to pretty often), I’ve realized how little the input medium mattered. No matter which of the tools I used, everything that I recorded is now either (a) in PDF format in Dropbox, or (b) stashed in Evernote.

Solution (a) should be familiar to you if you’ve made it this far in my post, but it’s worth stressing: keep every bit of digital information that’s important to you in PDF format. It’s standard, it’s viewable on any device, it’s not tied to a large corporation that constantly changes the meaning of file extensions, it’s searchable (especially with solid OCR software on Mac and iOS)…just do it.

Solution (b) is new to me, even though I’ve used Evernote off and on for many years. I’ve only recently started working with Evernote in a way that clicks for me, but I now rely heavily on Evernote’s solid handwriting recognition, which they do automatically once a note is on their servers. These improvements are reliable enough that I can choose to write on my iPad with a stylus and export to Evernote, or handwrite in a notebook and capture it with the Evernote app’s document camera. Here’s an example of some notes I took on my iPad (left) and on paper (right):

Evernote handwriting recognition
Evernote handwriting recognition

As you can see, both notes recognize the word “treat” despite some pretty terrible handwriting.

I’m still working out the kinks of what to keep as a PDF in Dropbox and what to ‘scan’ into Evernote (FYI, Evernote saves these scans as image files). The short answer is that I keep notes that I want to reference in Evernote, and notes that I want to keep working on (including journal articles that I want to highlight) in Dropbox. It’s still a work in progress, but I’m trying my very best not to stress about it. Both are highly searchable, organizable repositories, and Mavericks tags have added the tagging functionality of Evernote to Dropbox.

I’m sure I’ll expound on this in a later post, but hopefully somebody will find this useful.

  1. If you’re interested, I used Noteshelf with a Wacom Bamboo stylus and now use GoodNotes with an Adonit Jot Script. But I digress.  ↩