Handwritten presentation slides?

I see essentially two possibilities:

  1. Write out your slides on paper, then scan them.
  2. Get a Tablet & Pen combination and write directly "to your computer". I don't have experience with hand-writing slides this way, but I recently acquired a Wacom Intuos Pen which you could use for this. It has the additional benefit that you can use it in web conferences to write on a shared web whiteboard (this is the use case I personally got it for).

In case 1, you can scan your notes directly to PDF and present them. If you want to mix "classical" slides with your handwritten slides, you will need to mix PowerPoint or Beamer slides with graphics files containing your handwritten slides. You may need to experiment a bit with what picture format works best here, in terms of both file size and graphics quality.

In case 2, you can create PowerPoint presentations and write directly into the presentation with your Pen, which makes integrating "classical" and handwritten slides quite a bit easier.


Especially if these are for a lecture, you should really be using a blackboard (or whiteboard if you must) and write everything out during class. Presenting slides typically makes you go much faster than you would otherwise -- you forget how much time it took you to figure out the sign in an equation or the limits for some integral. While superficially this might help you "cover" more material, it's sure to lose everyone in the class. By writing things out as you go, you force yourself to think about the equations you're writing and about the speed at which a normal human being is able to process and understand them.

If it doesn't matter so much whether your students can follow the meaning of the equations you're writing down, then don't include them in your presentation. Direct your students to a book (or online notes), and use class time for something that they can follow.


It's a good idea to try, but I also wanted to add some notes of caution. I've used a couple of methods, the tablet and pen method to write on the screen in real-time. I've done this to annotate existing typeset slides during the class.

I've also have handwritten annotations on top of slides which I've scanned and presented as PDFs, and I've also used full handwritten slides scanned as PDF.

Student's can be very sensitive to the unorthodox. If the unorthodox makes for a much better learning experience (or often in their mind - better test scores!) then they will be all for it. However, if it doesn't improve their experience and they believe you are doing it "to save time typing", i.e. for selfish reasons, they can be very negative. The negativity can transfer into losing engagement and depressed results from that class.

If your institution has quality monitoring systems or formalised student feedback mechanisms you need to be sure that a learning quality improvement will result.

[*]OK. I'm the departmental teaching and learning quality officer ... just doing my job!