capturing your writing

Capturing Writing on Paper

Using smartphone / scanner

This is not a live capture. The assumption is that you only have access to a pen, paper, a mobile camera/ scanner, and a laptop.


  1. Write down the content you want to teach on sheets of paper as you would normally on a blackboard.

  2. Scan/ take a photograph of each sheet and transfer it to your laptop.

  3. Create an empty presentation in either PowerPoint or Open-Office. Don’t waste your time on Latex here :)

  4. Create a presentation with sheets of paper you just scanned in the sequence that you wish to talk through.

  5. Make sure to crop the A4 sheet image to a small sub-space which you can talk about for a couple of minutes.

  6. Duplicate the slide and crop to a different part of the image

  7. Repeat as many times as needed for each A4 sheet.

  8. Repeat for all the sheets that you wrote out.

  9. Keep the contents down to chunks of 15-20 minutes. It makes it easy for us as well as the student.

Demo video

How to crop images and create your presentation

hand-written-notes-lecture.mov

Sample video

Please see a sample of the video that you record using screengrab software like OBS as described in the previous section.

demo_med_res.mov

Smartphone - live capture

Take a piece of paper to write on.

Set up your phone to capture this paper view (for some cool jugaad ideas to set up your phone, click here ).

Open the camera app in your smartphone, change to video, hit the record button and of course, start writing !!

Document camera

This is the more sophisticated commercial version of the above. Its a camera placed facing down on a stand. You can place a piece of paper underneath it and start writing. It can capture stills or video of your live writing.

This live view can be hooked up to your computer and screen recorded with your voice !

This can also be used for live-demonstrations while you are teaching (yes - even in your office or home). Some document cameras can also be hooked up to microscopes (e.g. Epson) and used while lecture recording.

If you want to see and test a document camera - there is one in MSB304 classroom !

Capturing Writing on Your Screen

Non-graphics tablet

You may not have heard much about this - unless there is a digital artiste in you.

A non-display graphics tablet is like a much larger touchpad on a laptop, but does not respond to touches and will respond only to a stylus. So you can write with the stylus like a pen BUT the writing appears up on the computer screen like a mouse movement. There is a bit of learning curve here since your eye view is not on the place where you are actually writing with your hand. But with some practice you can get the hang of it.

You can see this video (posted by a school maths teacher who uses these devices)

Some of the brands to buy: Wazom, Huion, XP-Pen. They come in many variants with advanced ones used by artists and painters. For basic writing, the basic variant should be sufficient. The size of the tablet is important - a medium size one is better - closer to your laptop screen size (the tablet area gets mapped to the screen size).

Typical budget for a basic variant: Rs. 8000

Graphics Tablet

This is the one you may have heard much about - write on the screen directly in the most intuitive way ! This can be on a smartphone, a tablet, a 2-in-1 laptop or just a display screen connected to a desktop tower. You need a stylus and just start writing on the screen - just as you would with a pen on a piece of paper. You can screen record what you write and get your lecture done.


Budget:

Tablet ~ Rs. 20k

2-in-Laptop: Ranges from Rs. 70k to Rs. 2 Lakhs

Touch displays: Rs. 70k

Capturing Writing on a White Board

Writing on the White Board


Those who would like to write in white board or paper and take the class, can easily do so by using their mobiles as a webcam, following the instructions given in this section.


Install IPWebcam in your Android mobile. When the app is started it makes the mobile a server. When the user copies the IP address provided by the app to any browser in their laptop, the view through the mobile camera will be seen in the browser. For this to happen, the Andoid phone and your laptop should be connected to the same WiFi Router.


Start the Google hangouts meeting in one browser ( say Chrome) and then open the mobile web cam in another tab.


Here are the instructions (tried this on Android mobile + macOS machine)


1. Install IP Webcam from Google play

2. Start IPWebcam and click 'Start server'

3. Open a browser in your laptop and enter the IP address that is shown at the bottom of the mobile screen.

4. Click on 'Browser' option in the page that opens

5. Keep your mobile in a stand above (using a selfie stick or supported by a stool) a white board/paper

6. Start the Google Hangout meeting in another tab

7. Click on 'Present now' and choose 'A window'

8. Choose the window showing the mobile web cam and click 'share'

The participants will now be able to see the view through the mobile web cam in the main screen and the presenters face in a side screen. You can now start your class after choosing to record it.