Teacher who uses computer can zoom in and increase cursor visibility on screen aside from drawing free lines and displaying keystrokes. Thanks to KDE developers, Plasma desktop has these all enjoyable teaching features built-in since a long time. You do not need to install any application, just enable them on the System Settings. Together these make a complete environment for teaching especially for screencast and live presentation. I make this short article and also a video below to explain how to do that. Finally, if you want this superb teaching ability I suggest you to use Kubuntu the friendly operating system on your computer. Happy teaching!
(Take note that Super = Meta = Win key so Super+Shift or Meta+Shift is the same as Win+Shift)
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Index
- Example
- Zoom entire screen
- Cursor position indicator
- Click indicator
- Draw lines
- Typing indicator
- On screen notes
Example
Picture below depicts my computer screen with zoom follows cursor and red annotations I made by hand using built-in desktop features.
(Computer screen showing red lines made by Mouse Mark option and box magnification done by Magnifier option. | This computer uses Kubuntu operating system.)
1. Zoom Entire Screen
Press Win+= and Win+- for zoom in and out. The zooming follows wherever you move your mouse cursor. You can do multiple level of zoom too. The option name is Zoom. See the video for settings.
Alternatively, if you want a narrow zoom instead, enable Magnifier instead of Zoom so you see a box around your cursor limiting where magnification applies. See screenshot above.
2. Cursor Position Indicator
Press Ctrl+Win. The option name is Track Mouse. Now your little little mouse (pointer) is highly visible. See the video for settings.
3. Click Indicator
Press Win+Shift+8 and Win+Shift+8 to enable and disable click indicator. Now every of left, right, and middle clicks visualized on screen and even labelled with small tooltips. The option name is Mouse Click Animation. See the video for settings.
4. Draw Lines
Hold Shift+Win and move your mouse. Press Shift+Win+F11 to clear drawing. Now you can start scratching your screen creatively. You perhaps will need some exercises until you got accustomed to this feature. The option name is Mouse Mark. See the view for settings.
5. Typing Indicator
Run Screenkey program. Press Alt+F2 and type killall screenkey and press enter to turn it off. This is a separate feature not from KDE. Now you display anything you type on keyboard on screen. Learn more about using it here.
6. On Screen Notes
Run KNotes program. It will displayed on your system tray. You can make any number of notes. Press Add New Note and start writing text and right-click its header to display more settings including enabling rich text formatting (bold/italic).
(This desktop notes tool is the one useful I always use for my teaching life since 2017 and it is even useful to keep text I often copy to others such as my course rules, my bank account number, cc by-sa license, price list, etc.)
This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.