Working with Equations

Online LaTeX equation editors:

• Wiris - a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) LaTeX editor: http://www.wiris.net/demo/editor/demo/en/

TeX/LaTeX software

• LyX (Mac/Win/Linux): WGSIWIG TeX editor) http://www.lyx.org
• TeXShop (Mac): http://pages.uoregon.edu/koch/texshop/ (full installation of TeX engine and software at http://www.tug.org/mactex/)
• MikTeX (Windows): http://miktex.org/
• TeXPad (iOS): https://itunes.apple.com/app/texpad-latex-editor/id550419159?ls=1&mt=8

Bulk generating Moodle quiz questions in MatLab

• QBank Matlab GUI - developed by Dr Tristan Robinson from UCL Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEGE) - watch the video here

Using LaTeX in Moodle

Moodle supports LaTeX. You can add it to any text area by adding two dollar signs around your code E.g. 

$$ \Huge \gamma _{i}$$

It is recommended to make the code larger by adding \Huge before the code (be careful it's case sensitive). At the regular font size some figures will be difficult to read.

• Moodle Maths tools: http://docs.moodle.org/23/en/Mathematics

Capturing Handwritten equations

• Visualiser in a lecture theatre - You can write directly onto paper, but your hand will be in the way of the camera and writing on a flat, perpendicular surface is not as natural as positioning the surface at an angle, as you would when writing on paper. Also, you need to book a lecture theatre in order to use one.
• Wacom tablet - captures annotations, but as you are not writing directly onto the display surface it can take a while to get used to using the stylus as more of a mouse than a touch screen pointer.
• Apple iPad - All but the iPad Pro have issues with the palm of the hand being recognised, so you either need to hold the pen unnaturally hovering your palm above or to the side of the surface, or use specialist apps to cover part of the screen on which to reset your palm, which also seems to be a lot of effort just to write something on a surface.
• Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014) or Galaxy Note Pro 12.2 - The S Pen has a fine tip and writes much like a normal pen ignoring your palm pressed on the screen. It captures fast, small hand writing.There is a short lag between your movements and the ink appearing, which can be a little offputting, but overall it presents the most paper like experience, beyond actually writing on paper.
• Livescribe smartpen - you can stream the pen strokes of the Echo smartpen writing on special dot paper directly to the app, but the pen needs to be connected via a cable to the computer, which is also unnatural. If you want to record the audio using the smart pen and embed the video later you can do this using the pulse or echo smartpens. If you don't want to embed the pencast you can convert it to a video.