I am an online tutor, looking for a better solution for sharing math work with online students live. I’ve considered an overhead camera with just paper and pencils, a large chalkboard or whiteboard, and a USB drawing tablet for computers. Well, now I’m considering just drawing live on a tablet- as the price for the cheapest ones is no more expensive than a whiteboard! I ideally don’t want to spend a ton of money as it’s volunteer tutoring; if anyone has some unique solutions or thoughts I would love to hear them!
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I use DrawboardPDF on windows and it’s free. Of all the software I’ve used with a digital tablet this program makes my writing look better. It’s got some useful tools even on the free version. Typically I import pdf files but it can be a blank canvas too. Then screen share via zoom or google meet.
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Notability on an iPad with an Apple Pencil works perfectly for me. I can receive pictures through texts with my students and load them into the documents or they can email me PDFs
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I have a cheap graphics tablet (Gaomon brand), and it’s lasted me about 8 months and still working nicely.
Probably the Chinese govt is spying on me through it, but oh no, what’re they gonna do, learn the integral of ln(x)? Anyway.
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I find using a whiteboard rather complicated cause you need to balance writing big enough for the students to see and having enough space.
Maybe make a test before you buy one with a sheet of paper.
Personally I use an idea flex pad with one note and an exterior microphone and am relatively happy (minus writing control), but that is maybe a bit much for someone volunteering.
But it is such a small solution that I held lessons from my car.
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My cheap solution would be document camera and pens/pencils and/or mini whiteboard.
More expensive, I currently use a Microsoft surface and used it quite a bit during lockdown. With a good pen it’s very effective. I did find the online whiteboards were all a bit frustrating, and ended up using OneNote as my writing/sharing surface. Then I could clip pictures into the whiteboard and mark them up, and save a new page for each new lesson with that student, as well as easily look back at what we had done previously. Depending on your set up you can also share the notebook with your student.
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I use a 2-in-1 laptop that allow me to write on the screen and onenote to hold any pdfs/images I want to write on. Works awesome.
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When I taught on Zoom, I used a graphics tablet + photoshop for teaching math.
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