Web Paint

Teachers–
Stop what you’re doing and listen up. There is a Chrome Extension that allows you to draw on any web page.

When you share your screen with students, and you want to be able to call attention to something specific, you can use Web Paint to draw right on the screen.

Now, it’s not perfect. The menu is large and annoying. It’s not super easy to type on. But holy cow is it helpful. I don’t think a lesson goes by where I don’t use Web Paint at least once.

Here’s How to Use It

If you want to annotate the web page and share your screen in real time, you are going to open the Web Paint extension.

From there, you can draw a circle or box around text you want your students to look at, type on the screen, and draw an arrow or line.

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Let’s take a closer look at some of the functions:

The most useful ones are type, arrow, and circle or square.

When you’re ready to scroll or click on a link, click the arrow on the bottom row to get access to your regular mouse without losing your markings.

If you want to erase part of the screen, you can click on the eraser.

You can change the color, transparency, and size of any markings you make BEFORE you draw.

One major drawback for me is that the markings are static on the screen and sometimes I forget and begin to scroll down the screen displacing my markings.

The other thing is if you change the color while you are typing, it sometimes changes the color of the text you already wrote. If you don’t click off the color selector by clicking on the grey area of the menu, the color selector sometimes reopens while you are typing and it doesn’t let you continue until you click off.

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Finally, when you want to show the entire screen without the menu, you can minimize it and bring it back by clicking on the extension again.

All Done With your Annotations?

More Features:

You can also take a screenshot of the webpage with any markings you have made by clicking on the camera. You can crop the image, copy to clipboard, or download the image. Super helpful for saving your work.

If there’s a color on the screen you want to match, just click the dropper tool to choose that color for your markings. Sometimes, when I’m teaching, I want to switch back and forth between colors, but I can’t quite get the right color each time. This tool fixes that.

I use the curve tool to show the relationship between two words when I’m talking about grammar:

Happy Teaching!