Handwritten work can be challenging to share and submit in an online course. While online whiteboard tools are excellent for many purposes, they require fairly specialized input devices (a touch-surface device and a capacitive stylus) for detailed writing. When students do not have those, or need to write with more control than touch-surfaces offer, or need to submit hand-written work for an assignment, it may be simpler for most of them to write on paper and immediately take a picture of the paper for upload to a discussion board or assignment.
Weekly Ed-Tech Spotlight:
The LSA Teaching Remotely website is an ongoing and growing collection of recommendations and resources for LSA instructors, especially our Instructor Resources page. Be sure to check out both tabs, on that page, to see all the resources. You might also want to check out the Remote Assessment pages, if you find yourself needing to convert some of your assessments from in-person.
One of the consistent challenges in this process is getting the picture into a useful format. By default, smartphones take extremely high-quality photos, and that means very large file sizes. It is not uncommon for students to have trouble uploading such a large file. In addition, an image file is often difficult for other people to annotate and comment on electronically. These issues can be solved, however, by using a scanning app to take the picture and immediately convert the image into a PDF. A PDF is generally a smaller file, and can more easily be electronically annotated and marked up.
Scanning apps are generally simple to learn and often available for free. One popular example of such apps is CamScanner. Students open CamScanner and use their phone to photograph their work, and CamScanner converts it to a PDF for easy upload to Canvas or elsewhere.
Another reason to encourage use of such an app is that they often have tools to solve common problems with photos of handwritten work. Two common issues that can occur when submitting photographs of coursework with a phone camera include underexposed backgrounds that make it hard to read text and the unwieldiness of having to upload multiple image files. Apps like CamScanner automatically adjust the color and brightness of the scanned file before upload, attempt to render any text as editable text rather than an image, and also provide the ability to create PDFs containing multiple images in one file.
As always, your particular course activities and approaches will guide whether and how you want students to use a scanning app for hand-written work. If you are using Harmonize image annotation, for example, then you will want students to upload the image rather than a PDF! But for Canvas assignments or quizzes, it will probably yield better results for both you and your students if they use a scanner app to convert their hand-written work to PDF for upload and comment.
If you’d like to discuss how to best collect and respond to hand-written work in your courses, and what alternatives you may want to have in place for students without smartphones, please feel free to reach out to the
LSATSLearningTeachingConsultants@umich.edu. You can also
request a consultation appointment here.
