Yesterday, I started teaching using VNC to share my screen to my students. Unfortunately, I still had to draw on the whiteboard to emphasise on some points of the lecture. I used the whiteboard yesterday but today is different.

Successfully demonstrating code and lecture slides through their screens, I extended my tools by adding SmoothDraw – a free drawing tool that works very well with tablets. SmoothDraw is the recommended software by KhanAcademy in Windows. For Mac, you have the free Autodesk Sketchbook Express. Both of which were designed for tablets and drawing.

With my students viewing my screen, I put Notepad++ on the right side with SmoothDraw on the left and started drawing doubly linked lists while showing the code. On their computers, they were able to follow while they try to type the code themselves. I think my experiment was successful.

Aside from this, the students were exposed to tablets. I brought my Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch to school. The normally noisy kids were curious and wanted to draw using the tablet. The first thing that they wrote was their name or signature. How vain 🙂

I think this also gives me the opportunity to be more comfortable with tablets so I can perhaps improve my “drawing” skills. Haha! What a joke!