Observational study on teaching artifacts created using tablet PC

Teaching typically involves communication of knowledge in multiple modalities. The ubiquity of pen-enabled technologies in teaching has made the accurate capture of user ink data possible, alongside technologies to recognize voice data. When annotating on a white board or other presentation surface, teachers often have a specific style of structuring contents taught in a lecture. The availability of sketch data and voice data can enable researchers to analyze trends followed by teachers in writing and annotating notes. Using ethnographic methods, we have observed the structure that teachers use while presenting lectures on mathematics. We have observed the practices followed by teachers in writing and speaking the lecture content, and have derived models that would help computer scientists identify the structure of the content. This observational study motivates the idea that we can use speech and color change events to distinguish between strokes meant for drawing versus those meant for attention marks.