Digital Classroom Hardware: Drawing Tablet & Annotations (4 of 7)

Talking new tools for the trade

This series will walk through various types or classes of tech hardware that you might wish to add to your process.  We will attempt to look at a variety of tools and options as well as how some of these tools can be used in multiple or unexpected ways. 

Writing directly in the matrix

Of all the tools listed in this series, this particular tool is one that I have used the least, but it has some of the strongest adherents in the flipped learning community. To be clear, my artistic skills and drawing ability would be generously described as limited and more accurately described as best fit for large crayons.  However, while this tool was originally intended for artists and engineers, it is a useful tool to any teacher who can annotate or draw directional arrows.   The basic premise for the drawing tablet was as an extension of the computerized pen, allowing the user to write directly “onto” a digital document, and to grab, move, or manipulate objects in a digital environment, but releasing the teacher from using a desktop computer with a wired mouse.  This idea has been around for a very long time and is still an essential part of graphic design and computer aided drafting (CAD).  For teachers, the increasing affordability of these pen/tablet combinations means that whatever digital file we can find or any recorded media we have can be annotated and highlighted to focus student attention where necessary and to add additional information. I personally prefer to write on physical paper under my document camera, but others have long preferred to write and draw directly onto digital canvases that provide them a staggering number of creative tools.  While the leading brand of this type of tablet is Wacom, there are other lower-featured or cheaper alternatives.  Let’s take a look at a tool you may not be quite as familiar with.

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graphic: Marina Calvo, Laura Chicote y Tamara Domenech, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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