Which writing pad, pen tablet or iPad to buy for online teaching
For most maths and science teachers on a laptop, a medium pen tablet without a screen is the best first buy, if you give it two weeks of practice. Paper under a camera needs none.
On this page 8 sections
- Skip the LCD writing pad and compare these instead
- Pen tablet without a screen: cheap and tough, awkward at first
- Pen displays: writing on glass, with more cables
- An iPad or Android tablet with its own pen
- Paper under a camera, for teachers who want their own pen
- Lag, blur and what students see on their phones
- What to buy, by how you teach
- Frequently asked questions
If you teach maths, physics or chemistry from a laptop, buy a medium pen tablet without a screen: it's the cheapest proper option, and it lasts for years. The catch is the first fortnight, when your hand writes on the desk, your eyes watch the laptop and your handwriting looks like a Class 3 notebook. If you won't put up with that, write on paper under a camera. If money isn't tight, an iPad or Android tablet with its own pen is the most comfortable of the lot.
Skip the LCD writing pad and compare these instead
Search for a writing pad on an Indian shopping site and many top results are LCD writing boards, a dark slate you scribble on and wipe with a button. They're made for children's practice and shopping lists, and most never connect to a computer, so nothing you write on one reaches a live class or a recording.
What you want is sold as a pen tablet, graphics tablet or drawing tablet if it has no screen, and as a pen display if it does. Ignore the pressure-levels figure printed large on the box, because any current tablet has far more than handwriting needs. Look at the writing area, the cable and the pen instead, and prefer a pen that needs no battery. A pen that dies halfway through the 7 pm batch leaves you teaching the rest with a mouse.
| Option | Where you look while writing | Learning curve | With a laptop at home | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pen tablet without a screen | The laptop screen, not your hand | A couple of weeks of daily practice | One USB cable; works on laptop battery in a power cut | Daily live classes from a laptop on a tight budget |
| Pen display | The pen tip | A day or two | A second screen; needs a video-capable port, often its own power | Five or six hours a day at one desk |
| Tablet with its own pen | The pen tip | A day or two | Optional; it can teach and record on its own | Recording a course, teaching away from your desk |
| Paper under a camera | The paper | None | A USB document camera, or a phone on an overhead stand | Teachers who won't change how they write; geometry with instruments |
Pen tablet without a screen: cheap and tough, awkward at first
A pen tablet maps its surface to your screen. Touch the top-left corner of the pad and the cursor jumps to the top-left of the screen, unlike a mouse, which moves on from wherever it was. That fixed mapping makes handwriting possible, and it's also why the first days feel odd: you write on the desk and watch the letters appear half a metre away.
Practise on purpose rather than waiting for it to click. Write the same derivation for 15 minutes every day: the quadratic formula, the equations of motion, a balanced redox equation. Don't practise in the live class, where in front of 80 students you'll feel slow, reach for the mouse and never build the habit.
Push through it rather than retreating to slides. A 2014 study led by MIT researchers looked at 6.9 million viewing sessions on a large MOOC platform. Students stayed with problem walkthroughs handwritten on a digital tablet 1.5 to 2 times as long as with slide or code screencasts. The best of them, the researchers noted, came from instructors with clear handwriting who planned the page so it didn't get crowded.
Change two settings in the tablet's driver before your first class. The first limits the tablet to one display. If you've plugged a monitor into the laptop, the pad otherwise stretches across both screens and every letter comes out wide and flat. The second keeps the pad's proportions matched to the screen area it controls, so your circles stay round.
Size matters more than brand. A small pad, about 6 by 4 inches, fits in a laptop bag, but equations with powers and subscripts feel cramped on it. A medium pad, roughly 8 to 10 inches across, is what we'd suggest for most teachers. Larger ones mostly cost you desk space, which a study table in a rented flat doesn't have.
Pen displays: writing on glass, with more cables
A pen display is a screen you write on directly, so the coordination problem disappears and most teachers feel at home within a day or two. The one adjustment is parallax, a small gap between the pen tip and the line caused by the glass above the panel. Fully laminated screens keep that gap small, and listings say when a screen is laminated.
The connection is where people get caught out. Many pen displays run on a single USB-C cable for video, data and power. That only works if the laptop's USB-C port carries video, a feature called DisplayPort Alt Mode, and some laptops, budget ones especially, have a data-only port. Check the specification sheet before you buy. Otherwise you'll use the three-headed cable with HDMI, USB and a power adapter, and the display goes dark in a power cut unless it's on the inverter.
Set the pen display up as an extended screen, not a mirror, and share only that screen in the live class. Your laptop screen then stays private for attendance, chat and the WhatsApp messages that arrive mid-class.
An iPad or Android tablet with its own pen
You write where you look and the tablet records the lecture on its own, so you can teach from a hostel room or your parents' home over Diwali. It's also the most expensive way in: a tablet good enough for daily teaching costs several times as much as a pen tablet, before you add the pen.
The pen has to be the active pen made for that tablet. Cheap universal styluses with rubber tips are sold alongside, and they're useless for teaching. The tip is too fat for the 2 in H2SO4, and without palm rejection the screen reads your hand as a second pen. If an Android tablet doesn't list a supported pen, don't buy it for this. On an iPad, check Apple's Apple Pencil compatibility list before buying either one second-hand, because each Pencil works only with certain iPads. An iPad (9th generation), for example, takes only the first-generation Pencil.
For recorded lectures, the built-in screen recorder will do. Turn on Do Not Disturb first, or a parent's WhatsApp or a bank OTP can pop up and stay in the recording for good. On an iPad, open Control Center, touch and hold the screen recording button, and turn on Microphone before you start. Apple's guide notes a limit that matters here: you can't record the screen and use screen mirroring at the same time. So if you mirror the iPad to a laptop for a live class, record on the laptop. Android has a screen recorder in Quick Settings, and you choose whether it captures audio before you start.
Paper under a camera, for teachers who want their own pen
A document camera, also sold in India as a visualiser, points down at a sheet of paper while you write with an ordinary pen. A phone on an overhead stand does the same job for less. There's nothing to learn, so it suits a senior teacher with thirty years of chalk behind them who won't relearn handwriting at 55. It's also the only option where your compass, protractor and set squares work exactly as they do in class.
Use a thick black felt pen or sketch pen, since blue ballpoint goes faint on a phone. Light the page from both sides with desk lamps so your hand doesn't throw a shadow over the line you're writing. Don't rely on a ceiling light with the fan turning under it, because the blades make the page flicker. Tape the sheet down, as the fan will lift it, and mark the edges of the camera's view on the desk. Lock focus and exposure too, or the camera refocuses on your hand every time it enters the frame.
Paper has no undo, you can't paste a question in as an image, and going back to an earlier diagram means hunting through a pile of sheets. In a live doubt class that hardly matters. In a two-year JEE course that students revise from, it does.
Lag, blur and what students see on their phones
Pen lag, the delay between tip and ink, is too small to notice on any decent pen tablet, pen display or tablet with its own pen. Mirroring a tablet to a laptop over Wi-Fi is another matter: it adds visible delay and can drop frames, so use a cable for live teaching. The delay students complain about comes from the live class technology instead. It's a fraction of a second on an interactive call and can be several seconds on a broadcast-style stream to a few thousand students. That's why chat questions refer to the line before last. No writing device changes that.
What students do notice is blur. Most watch on phones, many on mobile data, and the player drops to a lower resolution when the signal weakens. Thin strokes and pale colours vanish first. Set the pen a step thicker than looks right on your laptop, and avoid yellow on white or dark blue on black. Then test every new setup by watching a recording on a phone at 480p.
What to buy, by how you teach
For two or three live batches a day from a laptop, get the medium pen tablet and give it two weeks of daily practice before you judge it. A tablet with its own pen earns its higher price when you mostly record courses over weekends, since there's almost nothing to set up. The pen display suits a teacher who sits at one desk for five or six hours a day and has a laptop that can drive it. Paper under a camera is the answer if you've tried a tablet and hated it, or teach geometry with instruments. Start with your phone on a stand and buy a document camera once the routine sticks.
If you're equipping a faculty room, don't order ten of anything on day one. Pass one pen tablet and one tablet with a pen round the maths and science teachers for a fortnight first. Don't be surprised if a senior teacher or two settles on paper. For the microphone, the backup connection and the rest of the setup, see our guide to starting online coaching classes in India.
Clear handwritten solutions are what students pay a maths or physics teacher for, and they're also what ends up in Telegram channels when a recording leaks. On Upclass, your live classes and recorded lectures play in an app in your institute's own name on Android, iOS, Windows and Mac. VidSafe proprietary encryption and screen- and camera-recording detection make that board far harder to lift. See how it works for JEE and NEET coaching, or book a demo.
Frequently asked questions
Does a pen tablet work with Zoom and Google Meet?
Yes. The computer treats the pen as a pointer, so it writes in any whiteboard or notes app. Share only that app's window in the meeting to keep notifications and other tabs out of view.
Can I use my phone as a writing pad for online teaching?
Yes, but as the camera over a sheet of paper rather than as the writing surface. A phone screen is too small for a derivation, and a finger or rubber-tipped stylus can't manage subscripts. Put it on an overhead stand and join the class from it as a second participant, with its microphone and speaker off so there's no echo.
Does a pen tablet work on a Mac?
Yes, if the listing names macOS support. After you install the driver, macOS asks you to allow it under Privacy & Security in System Settings, usually for both Accessibility and Input Monitoring. Until you switch those on, the pen won't work properly.
Which app should I write in?
Start with one you already have. Microsoft OneNote takes pen input well on a Windows laptop, and the built-in Notes app on an iPad is enough for a first lecture. Before paying for anything, check for pen thickness control, unlimited pages and pasting images.
