Sharing screens & writing

How to share your screen or touch-screen device and collaborate with students in the same space in realtime

Andrew Rice, 5 April 2020

Screen sharing

If your teaching style primarily involves you writing within the supervision then you might consider the screen sharing option. Screen sharing simply means that rather than sharing a video taken from your camera you will share a video of whatever is shown on the screen of your computer.

You will need a touch-screen device to write on. Options here include an iPad or an iPad Pro, a Microsoft Surface, or a Wacom Cintiq. Pens can be purchased separately for iPads.

Another option would be to prepare a document beforehand and then open in to scroll through in the supervision whilst sharing your screen.

Some online chat tools allow the same person to join a call from multiple devices. As far as I know Teams does not support this but Google Meet does. If your chosen platform does, and you have multiple devices, then you could set up one camera as an over-the-shoulder view of what you are writing.

There's a program called LonelyScreen (not free) that lets your PC/Mac computer receive a 'cast' from an iPad. This means that you can write on the iPad, 'cast' the iPad screen to your laptop and then screen share the result.

See also Collaborative whiteboards