Matthew West, Associate Professor, Mechanical Science and Engineering
Teaching with Technology Topic: Tablets for Lecturing
Primary Goal: To find a modern replacement for writing equations on the chalkboard.

Synopsis: For large classes the choice of tablets is easy. Our large lecture theaters either don’t have boards at all (e.g., GH 112 where Mariana and Gabe teach Introductory Statics), or the rooms are too big for effective board use. Even in smaller rooms I prefer a tablet because it makes it easy to weave together online material (course webpages, videos), pre-prepared examples (problem setups), real-time writing, and active learning (iclickers). Additionally, students appreciate lecture PDFs and lecture recordings as standard uploads after class.

Using a tablet routinely also makes it very easy to create extra videos out of class time. Geir uses this to avoid canceling or rescheduling class while traveling, because he easily records a lecture in his office (or hotel room, in a pinch) using exactly the same system as regular lecture. This technique also works well for uploading short videos for things like explaining homework problems.

Lessons Learned: There are two big downsides to tablets, however. First, increased technical complexity. It’s no fun to have 300 students getting increasingly noisy while you reboot for the third time in a row, although this almost completely goes away with good hardware and a bit of practice. The second big downside is that the effective writing area of a tablet is much smaller than an array of six or more blackboards. This is mainly a problem for long, complex problems, and for referring back to earlier results. Dealing with this is possible, but I had to change my writing style a little to copy earlier results and provide more outlines of structure. For my lecturing neither of these downsides outweigh the upsides of tablets.

Recommended Technology:

Windows-based tablets:

The most popular Windows tablet at the moment is the Microsoft Surface Pro. It has a good pen, is lightweight, and runs all the usual Windows software. The TAM SIIP team mainly uses Surface Pros (Randy, Yuhang, Mariana K, Gabe, Mariana S), as does most of the MatSE SIIP team (Cecelia, Kris, Robert, Jessica).

For software, Microsoft OneNote is best for writing-intensive lectures, while PowerPoint is also pretty good with the pen tools these days.

Mac/iPad tablets:

I’m fully invested in the Apple ecosystem, but I have to admit that the Apple story for tablets is not as good as the Windows side at the moment.

I currently use the iPad Pro 12.9″ for lecturing, with the beautiful Apple Pencil. This is the only iPad worth using for writing, because every iPad before the Pro has low-resolution digitizers that don’t work well with pens. The main downside of the iPad is that there is no lecture capture or iclicker software available for it. To get around this, Jeff routes his iPad through his Macbook using QuickTime (already installed), which he also uses for lecture recording. My current solution is to connect the iPad to my Macbook and run lecture recording (Echo360 Personal Capture) and iclicker instructor software on the Macbook. Good lecturing software on the iPad includes Notability (used by Jeff) and GoodNotes (my current favorite). The latest version of PowerPoint on iOS looks almost usable, except the presentation annotation tools are unworkably bad, and OneNote on iOS looks good but I don’t know anyone using it.

Matthew talks about technology to enhance student engagement (video):

Pictures of Matthew in action: