Do You Need a Graphics Tablet for Online Maths Tutoring?

The student half of this question is already settled

A student in a maths class should be writing on paper. Not because paper is romantic, but because the exam is on paper, the working has to be laid out down the page in the way an examiner reads it, and a student who has only ever solved equations by dragging a stylus has practised a skill that will not be assessed.

So the student's hardware problem is not how to write on the screen. It is how to let the tutor see the page — which is a camera question, not a tablet question, and it is answered by the phone already in the house.

Four ways to get handwriting onto a shared screen

For the person who does have to write on screen, there are four realistic options and they are not close to equivalent. The test is not whether you can produce a legible 7. It is whether you can write a whole line of algebra while talking, without the writing becoming the thing you are concentrating on.

A mouse passes the first test and fails the second badly. Straight lines and boxes are fine; a fraction with a binomial on top is not. A trackpad is worse, because the finger has to lift and reposition halfway through most characters, and every lift is a break in the letter.

A pen tablet — a flat pad with a stylus, no screen of its own — passes both. A pen-enabled touchscreen, where you write directly on the display, passes both and removes the learning curve, at several times the price.

• Mouse — free, already owned. Fine for arrows, boxes and ticks. Unusable for sustained working.
• Trackpad — free, already owned. Worse than a mouse for writing; better for nothing.
• Pen tablet with no display — the only purchase most tutors need to make, and the cheapest item in a teaching setup after headphones. Costs roughly what a month of group classes costs, once.
• Pen-enabled laptop or tablet computer — no calibration to learn, but several hundred dollars, and worth it only if you were buying the machine anyway.

The part nobody warns you about

A pen tablet with no screen means your hand is in your lap and the ink appears on the monitor in front of you. Everybody's first ten minutes with one are bad. Letters come out at the wrong size, lines drift upward, and the instinct to look down at your hand is very hard to suppress.

It goes away in about a week of daily use, and it goes away faster on a small tablet than a large one. A postcard-sized active area maps to the whole screen with a short movement of the wrist, which is how handwriting already works. An A4-sized tablet asks you to write with your elbow.

This is why the cheap small tablet is not a compromise version of the expensive large one. For writing digits, it is the better tool.

What our tutors use, and what we ask students for

Our tutors write on pen tablets, because the alternative is a class where the explanation stops every time an expression gets complicated. The whiteboard software matters far less than this; almost any of it is adequate once the pen is right.

We ask students for a notebook, a pen dark enough to photograph, and a way to point a camera at the page. Nobody is asked to buy a tablet to join a class, and a provider that tells you otherwise is describing their preference, not your requirement.