Dr. Keith Jones, 
Mathematics Department, 
SUNY Oneonta, 

One of the best pieces of advice I saw early in the online switch was to pick up a relatively inexpensive document camera and use that as a virtual whiteboard. It is very natural since, well, we’re already familiar with writing on paper! Unfortunately, I had already panic-bought a Microsoft Surface. I initially felt a bit silly about buying the Surface, but now I am very happy I did, since I basically run my classes on it, almost exclusively. I spent a fair amount of time during the “conversion week” trying to figure out the best solution for writing with a stylus, and I was ultimately unhappy with the relatively inexpensive Wacom stylus tablet I’d bought. I also struggled at first to find satisfying “whiteboard” software. Blackboard Collaborate does provide a shared “virtual whiteboard”, but unfortunately it is under-developed. I eventually settled on Microsoft OneNote. I’d started using OneNote this semester to organize my notes for my classes (not lecture notes, but “to-do” and other important information). It turns out OneNote handles drawing very well; so now my routine for each of my classes is to log in to Blackboard Collaborate with my laptop and then log in on my Surface as a guest (with microphone and sound off, to avoid the echo-effect). I make Surface guest-account a presenter. I create a new page in OneNote on the Surface and screen-share OneNote, with that page maximized. Now my tablet is a whiteboard that all my students can see. One can easily paste images into the notes and draw over them, etc, which is something I commonly do. 

Another benefit is that OneNote 2016 allows one to export any page as a PDF, so all notes can be uploaded to blackboard and shared with students. It should be stated that Windows 10 by default comes with OneNote “UWP” (Universal Windows Platform), which is a newer version that strangely does not support exporting PDFs. OneNote 2016 can be downloaded through Oneonta’s Office 365 online portal, and both versions of OneNote can coexist on the same computer nicely, it seems. This exporting feature is the only reason I have found to prefer the 2016 version, but it’s a significant one. 

The Surface has become my all-in-one solution for communicating mathematics, by taking advantage of OneNote for notes and short commentary on student work and the App Drawboard for grading multi-page PDF exam solutions. 

This is part of a series of posts collected by the TLTC and Faculty Center to share ideas and tools that have been helpful in the shift is teaching during the Spring 2020 semester.  If you are interested in sharing either a tool that you have found very useful or a method that you are now using in your courses, we would love to hear from you. Send your video or brief description to Chilton Reynolds and we will post it as a part of this series.