Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Grading using the Wacom Intuos S
I've been teaching economics for a few semesters already and, slowly but
surely, I'm starting to get the hang of it. Having to deal with teaching
remotely hasn't been easy though and I'm really hoping the winter semester will
be in-person again.
Although I worked way too much last semester1, I somehow managed to
transition to using a graphics tablet. I bought a Wacom Intuos S tablet (model
CTL-4100) in late August 2021 and overall, I have been very happy with it.
Wacom Canada offers a small discount for teachers and I ended up paying 115 CAD
(~90 USD) for the tablet, an overall very reasonable price.
Unsurprisingly, the Wacom support on Linux is very good and my tablet worked
out of the box. The only real problem I had was by default, the tablet
sometimes boots up in Android mode, making it unusable. This is easily solved
by pressing down on the pad's first and last buttons for a few seconds, until
the LED turns white.
The included stylus came with hard plastic nibs, but I find them too slippery.
I eventually purchased hard felt nibs, which increase the friction and makes
for a more paper-like experience. They are a little less durable, but I wrote
quite a fair bit and still haven't gone through a single one yet.
Learning curve
Learning how to use a graphical tablet took me at least a few weeks! When
writing on a sheet of paper, the eyes see what the hand writes directly. This
is not the case when using a graphical tablet: you are writing on a surface and
see the result on your screen, a completely different surface. This dissociation
takes a bit of practise to master, but after going through more than 300 pages
of notes, it now feels perfectly normal.
Here is a side-by-side comparison of my very average hand-writing2:
- on paper
- using the tablet, the first week
- using the tablet, after a couple of months
I still prefer the result of writing on paper, but I think this is mostly due to
me not using the pressure sensitivity feature. The support in xournal wasn't
great, but now that I've tried it in xournalpp (more on this below), I think I
will be enabling it in the future. The result on paper is also more consistent,
but I trust my skills will improve over time.
Use case
The first use case I have for the tablet is grading papers. I've been asking my
students to submit their papers via Moodle for a few semesters already, but
until now, I was grading them using PDF comments. The experience wasn't
great3 and was rather slow compared to grading physical copies.
I'm also a somewhat old-school teacher: I refuse to teach using slides. Death
by PowerPoint is real. I write on the blackboard a lot4 and I find
it much easier to prepare my notes by hand than by typing them, as the end
result is closer to what I actually end up writing down on the board.
Writing notes by hand on sheets of paper is a chore too, especially when you
revisit the same materiel regularly. Being able to handwrite digital notes gives
me a lot more flexibility and it's been great.
So far, I have been using xournal to write notes and grade papers, and
although it is OK, it has a bunch of quirks I dislike. I was waiting for
xournalpp to be packaged in Debian, and it now is5! I'm looking
forward to using it next semester.
Towards a better computer monitor
I have also been feeling the age of my current computer monitor. I am currently
using an old 32" 1080p TV from LG and up until now, I had been able to
deal with the drawbacks. The colors are pretty bad and 1080p for such a large
display isn't great, but I got used to it.
What I really noticed when I started using my graphics tablet was the input
lag. It's bad enough that there's a clear jello effect when writing and it
eventually gives me a headache. It's so bad I usually prefer to work on my
laptop, which has a nicer but noticeably smaller panel.
I'm currently looking to replace this aging TV6 by something more modern.
I have been waiting out since I would like to buy something that will last me
another 10 years if possible. Sadly, 32" high refresh rate 4K monitors aren't
exactly there yet and I haven't found anything matching my criteria. I would
probably also need a new GPU, something that is not easy to come by these days.
- I worked at two colleges at the same time, teaching 2 different classes (one of which I was giving for the first time...) to 6 groups in total. I averaged more than 60h per week for sure.
- Yes, I only write in small caps. Students love it, as it's much easier to read on the blackboard.
- Although most PDF readers support displaying comments, some of my more clueless students still had trouble seeing them and I had to play tech support more than I wanted.
- Unsurprisingly, my students also love it. One of the most common feedback I get at the end of the semester is they hate slides too and are very happy I'm one of the few teachers who writes on the board.
- Many thanks to Barak A. Pearlmutter for maintaining this package.
- It dates back from 2010, when my mom replaced our old CRT by a flat screen. FullHD TVs were getting affordable and I wasn't sad to see our tiny 20-something inches TV go. I eventually ended up with the LG flatscreen a few years later when I moved out in my first apartment and my mom got something better.
What happened in the 
Improvements are 
Debra and Ian at Tanagra.
The Source.
The Source at Yahoo.
Jaldhar and the Source at Tanagra.
Torvalds under two moons, his sky is grey. Git, his arms wide.
Jaldhar of Tanagra, Git of Torvalds, at Lungha.
Jaldhar and Git in court. The court of silence.
Jaldhar, his eyes closed.
#debian-devel, its arms wide, its thighs fat.
Jaldhar, his eyes open!
The Source in Git, its sails unfurled.
Update: From Barak A. Pearlmutter who doesn't have a blog.
