Tabulexa

Digital handwriting app for teaching.

Motivation

The app provides a simple interface for handwritten lectures and presentations. You can either project your notes while writing to a second screen, projector, and television, or you can pre-record your handwriting and replay it during your presentation.

Requirements:

Windows 10 (version 1903 or later)

Touch or pen sensitive display + Digital pen

It helps to write on a device that is flat on a table, e.g. a 360 degree laptop, a pen display, or a device of the Microsoft surface family.

Tabulexa @ Microsoft Store

Motivation

Handwritten lectures have always been popular in sciences and show a recent revival in other fields. Writing on a blackboard decelerates the lecturer and provides enough time for the listeners to digest the content. The students need to focus when copying the lecture notes and it forces them to follow a derivation step by step. Just watch students during a typical “death-by-powerpoint” presentation and compare it to the focused concentration during a maths lecture.

However, blackboards and whiteboards are no longer timely and they are often removed from lecture rooms. Covid-19, with a demand for online teaching, accelerates this process even more. This app provides a simple interface to write and project your notes during a lecture to a second screen, such as a projector, television, or Zoom window.

Design goals

Decouple the lecturer’s presentation interface from the projection window for the students.

The main reason to decouple both windows is not the student’s distraction due to control-buttons and flyout-menus, but it is the need to zoom in and out while writing with a digital pen. Most people seem to have a larger handwriting on a graphics tablet than on a sheet of paper. To avoid filling the complete board with just a few lines of text, it is necessary to increase the zoom factor while writing. The students, however, should only see the complete window without changing sizes.

Mix live handwriting with pre-recorded notes.

There are incredible educational videos with handwriting on youtube, e.g., see the Khan Academy. The presentation style and the pedagogic concepts in those videos are fantastic. Unfortunately, today’s students start to expect a similar presentation quality during a lecture. Pre-recording your lectures slides can improve the artistic style and readability. In addition, it is a waste of time to prepare the layout of the text before the presentation, erase it, and reproduce it with the students. It is much easier to pre-record the handwritten text and to replay sections of it during the lecture - whenever it is needed.

Control modes

The app has three control modes that can be selected on the first page.

The DIRECT mode provides the normal live-lecture experience. The projection windows displays directly what you write on the tablet or laptop.

The EDIT mode is intended for the preparation process. It allows you to write the text for a lecture and to group your notes in replay blocks. You can split, join, and re-order the text blocks.

The REPLAY mode is intended for a live-lecture with replay elements. You can write text in the same way as in the direct mode. Pre-recorded blocks are greyed out and not visible to the students untily activate the replay when needed.

Projection window

Only the projection window is observable to the students. It will always open on the next display in your Windows 10 display list, i.e. the display that follows after the display of the main app window. Typically, this is on a projector or a second monitor, but it can also be on a television or another miracast device. Repeatedly pressing of the “Flip screen” button cycles the projection window through the display list.

You can project to any device that is used as an extended screen in Windows 10.

Miracast/other PC: You can use Miracast or other wireless display adapters to display your projection window on a television, HDMI device, or on another Windows 10 PC. Connect the device using the “Connect” button in your notification panel. For the Tabulexa app, your television is just another device in your display list, and you can use the “Flip screen” button to move your projection window to another display.

Zoom: To share the projection window in Zoom, just start “Screen sharing” in Zoom and select the projection window. Do not expect too much. The update frequency for your handwriting will be slower than on a second screen or projector (but still much faster than Zoom’s internal whiteboard). You can get slightly better results if you select the option “Optimize screen sharing for video clips” at the bottom of Zoom’s selection window when you activate screen sharing.

Full screen modes: The user interface and the projection window can be switched to fullscreen mode with the “Fullscreen” buttons (diagonal arrows). To exit the fullscreen mode, tap the middle one of your three window buttons. The window buttons are usually hidden in fullscreen mode, and you need to move your pen or mouse pointer to the top right corner to see them.

Side ratio of the projection window

It is helpful to chose already during the preparation of the lecture a side ratio that is close to the ratio of the projector. Each page has a permanent side ratio, which is set during the page creation. Opening a projection window changes the displayed side ratio in the main window to match the ratio of the projection window. The permanent side ratio of the document reappears once the projection window is closed.

Privacy policy

The app does not collect your personal data. It requires access to just a base folder to store your handwitten notes. Each new document is stored in a subfolder of that base folder.

You can use the following link to Microsoft's App Store:

Tabulexa @ Microsoft Store

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