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math homework handwritten solutions with Wacom Tablet?

Submitted by mathknitter on March 28, 2008 - 12:42pm.

Hello all.

I teach math and write out solutions to homeworks by hand. (It would take forever to typeset them, and I like to show the students that it really is possible to write out all the solutions by hand. If I can do it, they can do it.)

For now I’m scanning them and posting pdf files on Blackboard (a web thingy for education… students can access the files there).

When I make a mistake or want to revise the homework assignment for the next semester, I would like to be able to edit a file on my MacBook instead of cutting and pasting (literally) and rescanning.

Our ITS people have given me a Wacom Tablet (intos_3 6X8) to play with. Ink is a pain. Note that I’m not looking for handwriting recognition. I would like to keep my handwriting. A tablet PC would be great, but they won’t buy one of those for me.

What software can I use with the Wacom Tablet? Any ideas? Should I be using Photoshop?

Thanks so much,

Mathknitter

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I don’t think you’ll be

Submitted by mwr on March 28, 2008 - 7:18pm.

I don’t think you’ll be able to do edits much more sophisticated than the cut-n-paste. It’s not like you’ll be able to insert a sentence somewhere and have either the scanned image or the Wacom-captured stuff word-wrap accordingly.

If you wanted to keep the handwritten look and still make reasonable edits, I’d either stick with the Wacom and use whatever photo editing or illustration software you want to do direct changes, or else go back to scanning with a couple of potential changes:

  1. Consider changing paper to an engineer’s computation pad. It’s gridded on the back side so that if you photocopy it, the grid lines won’t show up on the copy. In your case, you could use it to keep your text lines parallel, sketch out graphs, etc.

  2. Even though the computation pad would probably be green or beige, a little editing work to convert it to greyscale and then to threshold or posterize it to wash out the paper color to pure white would make it ridiculously easy to move around lines of your solutions in case you needed to add more steps in the middle.