Teaching online with a pen: a simple setup that works

In a classroom you point, underline and work things out on the board without thinking about it. Move the lesson online and most of that disappears. You end up describing where to look, or pasting everything into a separate whiteboard app and teaching from a copy of your material instead of the material itself.

A pen over your screen gets most of it back. Here’s a setup that stays out of the way and holds up across a whole term.

Tablet or trackpad?

You don’t need a graphics tablet to draw on screen. A trackpad or mouse is fine for circles, arrows, boxes and highlighting, which covers a lot of teaching. Where it falls down is handwriting: writing a word, a formula or a working-out with a mouse is slow and looks like it.

If you write on screen more than occasionally, a tablet is worth it. You don’t need an expensive one. A small tablet without a screen, where you draw on a pad and watch the result on your monitor, is enough for lesson annotation. Your hand gets used to looking up rather than down within a lesson or two.

LivePen works either way. With a tablet it uses the pen’s real pressure, so strokes swell and thin as you press. With a mouse or trackpad it simulates pressure from how fast you move, so lines still taper instead of looking like a uniform marker.

Where to put the tablet

Small things decide whether a tablet gets used or ends up in a drawer:

• In front of the keyboard or beside it, on your writing-hand side. It shouldn’t be somewhere you have to reach for.
• Squared up to the screen. If the tablet is rotated relative to your monitor, lines drift at an angle and handwriting slopes.
• Mapped to the screen you share. If you have two monitors, check the tablet driver’s settings so the pad covers the display you teach on, rather than stretching across both.
• Pen within reach, not in its box. A pen holder next to the tablet is worth more than any setting.

Choose a colour language

Colour is the quickest way to tell students what kind of mark they’re looking at. Pick a small system and use it every lesson, so students learn it without being told:

• One colour for working, usually black on light material or white on dark slides.
• Red for corrections or “look here”.
• Green for right answers, ticks and good examples.
• Yellow highlighter for the text to read.

LivePen has six colours on the toolbar and you can change any of them in Preferences. The highlighter is translucent, so the text stays readable underneath. Use the thicker weights for anything you’re pointing at and the thinner ones for writing.

Teach from the real material

The advantage of drawing on the screen itself is that you don’t have to move anything. Open the slides, the PDF, the worksheet or the website you’re teaching from, and draw straight over it.

• Slides: run the slideshow as normal, draw on the slide, then stop drawing to advance.
• PDFs and worksheets: open them in Preview or your browser, zoom in on the question you’re working through and draw over it.
• Websites: draw over a live page, a map, an online simulation or a source text. While drawing is on, your clicks go to the pen, so you can scribble over a link without following it.

The one rhythm to learn is that drawing and clicking take turns. Press ⌥⇧D to draw, and press it again to get your clicks back, change the slide or scroll the page.

On a video call, share your whole screen rather than a single window, because a window-only share may not include the drawing on top. In a physical classroom, put your Mac on the projector and it works the same way. LivePen draws on your primary display, so make that the one students see.

Number the steps

Methods have an order, and students lose it. The numbered step tool (key 8) drops a numbered badge each time you tap: 1, 2, 3. Put them down as you go through a long division, the stages of an experiment, or the order to read a diagram in.

The numbers follow what’s on screen. Undo the last badge and its number is free again, so if you place 4 in the wrong spot, ⌘Z and tap again and you still get 4. Clear the screen and the count starts again from 1.

Keep your working on screen

By default, stopping drawing wipes the screen, which is right for quick pointing. For teaching you often want the opposite: work part of a problem, click to reveal the next part of a slide, then carry on writing next to what you already did.

Set Preferences → When drawing stops to Keep the drawing. Your ink stays when you stop, and when you start again your undo history comes back with it, so you can still take back a stroke from before the pause. Press ⌥⇧C to clear when you’re ready to move on.

One thing to bear in mind: the drawing sits on the screen, not on the page. If you scroll or change slides, the ink stays where it was. Clear it when the content underneath changes.

Mistakes, cleanly

Everyone slips mid-sentence. A few ways to fix it without starting over:

• ⌘Z undoes the last stroke, and ⇧⌘Z puts it back.
• The eraser (key 0) removes whole strokes, so one touch takes away a mistake without smudging what’s around it.
• Tablet buttons work out of the box: on a Wacom pen, the right-click button undoes, and the erase button switches to the eraser while you hold it.

Stamps for lessons

Drawing a tick fifty times a lesson gets old. The icon tool (key 9) stamps a pictogram instead, from a library of 1,848 icons. In Preferences you can pick which starter set opens first in the picker:

• Teaching: classroom marking, with grades, subjects, praise and corrections.
• Kids: animals, weather, food and toys, the concrete things a young child can name.
• Study: notes, deadlines and revision, for tutoring older students.

Pick the set that matches your class and the stamps you use most are right at the top.

A setup checklist

1. Open the material you’re teaching from.
2. Share your whole screen, or put it on the projector.
3. Pick your colour and weight on the toolbar.
4. Press ⌥⇧D to draw, and again to click.
5. Turn on “Keep the drawing” for lessons where you build up working.

Trying it

LivePen is a small Mac app with a 14-day free trial, no account or card needed. The teaching page shows the tools in a lesson, and the docs list every key and setting.