For mathematics, you may wish to have a way to write/draw maths live on the screen.
Handwriting hardware options
- A graphics tablet is an effective way to input handwriting. Wacom is a good well-known brand, and XP-Pen is another.
- Touchscreen devices (like iPads or Surface Books) are often very nice to write on - the challenge is how to link them to the device you’re running your video from. Windows CONNECT or MacOS Sidecar can be used to do this.
- Another option is to write on paper/a whiteboard and use a visualiser - a brief bit of time spent setting up a camera (which can be an external webcam, a laptop camera with the screen tipped down/a clever mirror, or a phone), a light, and some paper will pay off. You might need to find a way to flip a camera image 180° (OBS and other camera mixing software can do this, ) if you don’t want the camera stand to be in the way of where your arm is; solutions involving suspending the camera (on a pile of books or similar!) are fine, as none of it will be seen on camera.
Handwriting software
- Microsoft (Office) OneNote, Google Jamboard, Bitpaper (paid), Loom, and many others (listed in the TMiL Doc) all help you get some handwriting on screen - possibly in a shared way, or a way that can be shared over a video call.
- You can write directly onto a live Powerpoint slide (click the pen tool in the bottom left of screen) which gives a very simple way to annotate slides, or create a blank slide to give a simple ‘paper’ to start writing on.
Other ideas
If you can master the lighting conditions and write big enough, you could point a camera at yourself and a large whiteboard or flipchart, and present maths that way. You should check that it works and is readable on video, and use dark/thick pens!
One quite fancy option is a Lightboard - a glass whiteboard that's lit from the sides, so if you use a white pen on it in front of a black background your writing is brightly lit, and you can be in shot as well. They're very expensive (~$5-10k) to buy, but the inventor has shared instructions for you to build your own if you're so inclined, which brings it to under a few hundred pounds.