Handwritten, Digital Lecture Notes: A First Attempt

Motivation

The idea of posting lecture notes online and prior to class has intrigued from the beginning. First, I tried recording lectures and posting them to my YouTube channel. But with the available version of Blackboard, I couldn’t track specifically which students were watching the videos. This was bad for me as a teacher and as a math education data miner. Typing up lecture notes in Microsoft Word or OneNote would be too time consuming due to all the equations and graphs that would have to be created. So this is my next attempt at providing my students with lecture notes prior to class.

Methodology

Setup

I am writing my notes in Microsoft OneNote 2013 on a Lenovo Yoga Pad (Intel Core i7 4500U, 8GB RAM) running Windows 10 Pro. This hardware is a 2-in-1 laptop and tablet, which means that the screen has capacitive touch input. The stylus that I’m using is an Adonit Jot Pro, which by the way is an excellent stylus I took lecture notes for the first week for a college algebra class and a business calculus class.

Converting handwriting to text

At first, I tried converting my handwriting, both text and math, into their proper typeseting. There are two ways of doing this conversion. First, within paid versions of OneNote, there are buttons under the “Draw” tab to convert “Ink to Text” and “Ink to Math”. The other method uses the handwriting input panel and the math input panel. All conversions required some degree of manual correction, with the math conversions requiring the most. Out of all of these methods, the handwriting input panel was perhaps the best due to it taking a few words at a time. This meant that my errors could be more easily detected and were quicker to correct due to the software offering suggested corrections.

Once I dug through the settings, and told the handwriting input panel to allow me to write words one letter at a time rather than altogether with cursive writing, the handwriting became accurate enough to be usable. The mathematical handwriting was astonishing, but not good enough to use regularly. I say this because recognizing mathematical writing is much harder than regular writing. With subscripts, superscripts, funny Greek letters, large fractions, etc., Microsoft has done a great job with their math input panel. It’s just not finished yet. Take for examles some common errors which I came across (1) the math input thinks my ‘0’s are ‘3’s; (2) I cannot write my ‘1’s with the hat and stand serifs; (3) and multiline equations are out, and so get used to equations that ride off the right hand side rather than down the page.

Just handwriting

The tedium of converting and correcting lead me to just leave my handwriting as is. As an aside, the troubles which I list in this section are troubles that also plagued were present when trying to do conversions. The first and primary problem that I encountered was that of palm rejection on my setup. Because I’m using a capacitive stylus, my laptop is unable to distinguish between my stylus and my palm. So when I’m lucky, my palms won’t interfere with my use of the stylus. But too often, my palms would create unwanted marks within OneNote or select another application to the foreground, which interrupted my work flow. To avoid this, I would need to use something like a Wacom stylus or switch to a Microsoft Surface and it’s pen. In other words, some other setup where the device and stylus communicate through means other than capacitance. This inability with my palm on the writing surface forced me to write in an unfamiliar way, resulting in my handwriting being worse than usual. Thus my writing was not as clean as I would prefer.

My only other complaint is minor. The only way that I could draw in a thick dot was to manually select a pen with a larger stroke size. Then I could dab a point onto OneNote. This is a small complaint until you realize that drawing points in math is rather common. Then this required and manual formatting change, which takes a few seconds, starts to become a real nuisance.

Results

I apologize for the nonnative web file formats. My future syllabi will be HTML. But I do not know about any web-friendly handwriting file formats nor any robust applications which support them.

• College Algebra
  • Lecture Notes OneNote
  • Lecture Notes PDF
  • Syllabus Word Docx
• Business Calculus
  • Lecture Notes OneNote
  • Lecture Notes PDF
  • Syllabus Word Doc

Conclusions

I am not going to continue with this setup. It’s too tedious. My plan for now is maybe LaTeX, until I get my Livescribe pen and paper back. I’m eying a Surface Pro 4 though. It has the palm rejection due to the non-capacitive pen, and the extra buttons on the pen promise to eliminate a lot of the tedium of handwriting in OneNote.

Handwriting text worked rather well. My computer registered my stylus marks almost immediately. And if anyone is looking for a stylus for their electronic device, I highly recommend Adonit Jot Pro because of its precision. I was able to make marks exactly where I wanted with little to no difficulty.

Addendum

Turns out that typing math into OneNote, and other Office products, is a lot easier once you learn that the keyboard shortcut to insert an equation is Alt+=. Now I just need to figure out how to quickly and easily put graphs into OneNote.

Feedback

Are you doing something similar? Let me know what you do and also what your setup is in the comments.