Tablet closest to pen and paper for grading essays?

April 3, 2020 1:04 PM

What tablet will most closely resemble the experience of grading papers with a pen on an 8 1/2 X 11 piece of paper? I

I know very little about tablets, but I want to either: 1) have students email me essays as Word or PDF documents or 2) have students upload essays to Blackboard. After that, I want to use a stylus to write handwritten notes on the PDF or Word files, save them, and return them to the students either by 1) email or 2) uploading them back to Blackboard.

What tablet will be most like the experience of doing this on an 8 1/2 X 11 piece of paper? I'm guessing the answer is an iPad with an Apple pencil, but ideally I'd like to spend less than $500. And: will I need to buy Microsoft Office on top of the tablet price to work with Word documents?

posted by tomorrow to Technology (8 answers total)

Cost note: 10.2-inch iPad (base model) + Apple Pencil (original) should come in at just about $500 (less if you can catch a deal on a refurbed Apple Pencil). My use so far has been pretty light, so I'll defer to the pros on that.
posted by praemunire at 1:18 PM on April 3, 2020 [1 favorite]

I’d highly recommend the reMarkable tablet. I compulsively doodle and I can erase doodles. It will also turn my chicken scratch writing into any font I want, with pretty decent accuracy. It does really feel like paper, with the texture and slight resistance you’d expect.
posted by unstrungharp at 1:43 PM on April 3, 2020

will I need to buy Microsoft Office

If you're at an educational institution you may already have access to Microsoft Office for free, or at the very least a decent discount. Otherwise a subscription to Office costs about $120/year lets you and 4/5 other people download Office on your devices and get 1TB of cloud storage each, so isn't a bad price for what it is, especially if you can split the cost of it with those other people.

That being said if you just need to access standard Word documents without interesting formatting or functions then either something online like Google Docs should do the job. Or just ask your students to send everything to you in PDF and then your tablet's software should be able to deal with it.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 2:01 PM on April 3, 2020

clarifying question: if there was a super easy way to scan documents you had printed and graded by hand on paper, and upload those, would that also solve the problem? Or would that be a useful stop-gap for you, because you, say, already have a laser printer and it will take a while for your new tablet-based solution to arrive in the mail?

If the answer is yes, even if only as a short term solution , you could do that in the near-term, and use an app, available for both iOS and Android, called "Tiny Scanner" which is very good at scanning multipage documents in black and white (no gradient) relatively quickly. I believe I shelled out for the paid version, but I don't think it was more than 5 dollars. It will save and convert them to pdfs, and from within the app you can email them, upload them to dropbox or google drive or one drive (if you use any of these) .. it might even be possible to upload them to the android or ios blackboard app directly from Tiny Scanner, if you have/use such an app.

hope this helps
posted by elgee at 2:49 PM on April 3, 2020 [1 favorite]

Without doubt,the ReMarkable tablet is the most paper-like, but it's also the most limited.
posted by dobbs at 7:05 PM on April 3, 2020

If the tablet that you end up getting has a smooth, glossy screen, I have found that a matte screen protector with a tiny bit of texture goes a long way toward that pen-and-paper experience.
Ones I've personally liked: Paperlike (only for iPad), and iCarez (for any number of devices).
posted by D.Billy at 7:46 PM on April 3, 2020

I bought a used first-generation iPad Pro about four years ago. It’s the big size (12.9”) so a whole 8.5x11 sheet fits on the screen. It’s still going strong, and cost half of what a new one would, and that was three or four generations ago. I recommend buying used or refurbished of an older model. I also have an iCarez screen protector, which helps a lot.

I bought the device for drawing, but I use it just as much for proofreading and marking up PDFs. It’s nice to have a color screen for highlighting and markup, or else I would be interested in the reMarkable. Before I got the iPad, I tried a wide variety of pen-based computers, including the Sony Digital Paper system. Even though the e-ink screen is more comfortable to read than an LCD, the extra functionality of the iPad makes it a better value for me.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 6:12 AM on April 4, 2020

An eink device is way more paper-like than an LCD tablet. I recently got an Onyx Boox Note 2 for reading and note-taking and annotating PDFs, and I like it better than any other setup that I have tried.
posted by medusa at 12:35 PM on April 4, 2020