For Your Consideration

As we’ve been transitioning our in-person learning centers to be fully online, the question has come up about how to use slides and work with students. While Zoom offers screen-sharing and annotation, the annotation on an actual slide persists on the screen: if you scroll to a new slide, the annotation remains. There’s no way to annotate a document using Zoom. Even worse, the “whiteboard” feature in Zoom, though cool in many ways, really loses out by having no way to paste formatted text, or even images, onto it. That takes away significant functionality.

At our learning centers, we use a Windows-only piece of software called Drawboard. It’s a pretty nice piece of software with nice annotation tools. It could be a bit more fully-featured (making straight lines or shapes is rather difficult/impossible), but our teachers are used to it. However, it’s $12 and we can’t expect teachers to buy it. Furthermore, all of our teachers are working from home, and many will be using Mac (or even Linux, believe it or not!) So, this isn’t an option. Luckily during my time training, I got some recommendations from a few resourceful teachers.

First is Xodo. It’s a browser-based app where you can import and mark up PDF documents. That’s really all there is to say. It has the same features our instructors are familiar with, and works pretty fine. I actually had some trouble getting it to be as responsive, but I haven’t heard that complaint from others, so it might be specific to me.

Another is bitpaper. This one I really like. It has collaboration features (although teachers likely wouldn’t use them), but it’s much sleeker than Xodo in my opinion. It has a more “iPad” feel to it, with the tools in the bottom very similar to those in the Apple Notes app. It has basic straight-line drawing and keyboard shortcuts.

I’m still working on properly vetting these before we can officially recommend as a company, but they all pass the smell test for me. Even if you aren’t a teacher and just want simple PDF tools, I think Xodo is a good place to start for a lot of mark-up, and bitpaper is excellent for easy collaboration.

My company is using Zoom, as are many universities and public school systems, to teach online. I’m hoping at some point, when the fires are put out, I can provide some of my own suggestions for using Zoom that have come up during my time dealing with the transition. For now, another short post.

The biggest thing for us is being able to still run interesting activities that are engaging. Just because this new medium assumes lecture-style classes on the surface, there’s a lot that can still be done with a bit of creativity.

This is a little note about a wonderful extension for Gnome (a popular desktop environment for Linux). Out of the box, Gnome is a bit light on features and settings. Enabling Tweaks and Extensions allows for a lot of customization.

A recent discovery is the extension Caffeine. There’s very little to it. All it does is put a little coffee cup indicator in your top menu bar. When activated, you get some steam coming out of the cup, and your computer screen will never go to sleep. When it’s deactivated, it does nothing.

(For reference, also visible is Dropbox and another Gnome extension that enables clipboard history.)

This may seem small, but when I’m recording a podcast I am not doing much with my computer, but I certainly need it to stay awake. For a long time I would have to either wiggle my mouse every few minutes, or go into my power settings and set sleep to Never. Neither of these are elegant solutions. Just clicking the little icon in my menu is much simpler. It’s little ideas like this extension that allow my devices to go from a tool I’m working around to one that works for me.

I’m sure very few people reading this run Linux (or have much desire to), but most platforms have similar little applications that can increase ease of use. I suggest thinking about what things bother you on a somewhat regular basis, and search for a solution. Odds are someone else is having the same annoyance.

In my next adventure of programming projects, I decided to install Android Studio and play around with app development. To start, I have no particular thing in mind, I’m just getting my head wrapped around the structural complexity of an app. It’s a far more involved software situation than anything I’ve dealt with. I’m following this tutorial put together by Google Codelabs. It definitely assumes some familiarity with programming, but I’ve found it fairly easy to follow with simple explanations. Overall it’s been a fun task to play around with. The biggest shift is accepting the number of extremely high-level commands and classes that exist, compared to the (relatively) low-level projects I’ve done before. A lot is done for you in terms of graphical design right away, and the tools seem very nice to work with. It’s a fun shift in mindset that I look forward to exploring more.