XP-Pen Stylus

You are at:

Some faculty need to be able to write and draw in recordings and creation of materials. They can do this with:

Windows laptop with touchscreen. The recommended DePaul laptop is the Windows Surface Pro.
iPad
Android tablet

If faculty need an affordable option, the XP-Pen stylus pad works with Windows and Mac. Faculty will need to install a driver to use, so this will not work on classroom PCs. It will work on:

Home computers
Faculty laptops
Office computers

I have tested the XP-Pen. It does the job, and is affordable. Two versions to consider:

Active Area: 4 x 3 inches ($20)
Active Area: 6 x 4 inches ($30)

How It Works

The stylus works like a virtual mouse. After installing the drivers, the stylus operates as a virtual mouse. Simply move it to a position on the board and the mouse cursor on the computer screen follows. The stylus has two buttons on the side, that operate like regular mouse buttons. You can use these for the equivalent of left- and right-moss clicks.

Where the stylus becomes useful is in annotating content, such as:

Drawing On Slides In A PowerPoint Presentation

Start your PowerPoint presentation
Move your cursor to where the four helper buttons appear in the lower left corner of your slide.
Click on the Pen button and choose "Pen Color." Red is the default color.
Select a color that will be easily seen on your slides.
Annotate the slide you are on, and then use your keyboard or clicker to advance to the next slide.

On some versions of PowerPoint, your pen will revert to a cursor as you move from one slide to another. A quick way to re-activate the pen on a slide is to press the Command key (⌘) and the letter "P" in macOS.

Annotating a shared screen or whiteboard in Zoom

Zoom has detailed instructions on how to annotate either a s hared screen or a whiteboard on their website.

Annotating content in OpenBoard

OpenBoard is a free and open-source interactive whiteboard software. We use it to record in our MiniStudio. The software runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux.

You can import content from PowerPoint, Word, PDF, along with image files into OpenBoard and use this as a presentation option in videos.