I like to design my lectures around slides that can be annotated. When teaching standard organic chemistry courses, I leave lots of blank spaces (e.g., for mechanisms). This provides a bunch of advantages: it makes the students draw structures, which I think is important; it controls the pace of the lecture; and it substantially shortens lecture prep time by cutting down on all the ChemDraw.

Miami has installed smartboards in most of our lecture halls at this point, but I’ve never used them. I’m a bit too uncompromising as a Mac/Keynote user (this should work with PowerPoint too), and I’d much rather use an iPad. For years I used the Doceri app. This worked pretty well through many iterations of lecture classes, but I was never completely satisfied with Doceri; it does its job, but there were small nagging problems. For example, it has poor Apple Pencil support (at least as of a few years ago), and I never loved the way it would freeze the screen when you wanted to write something.

I spent a few years teaching mostly lab classes and put this sort of stuff aside. This spring, I was back to teaching second-semester sophomore organic chemistry and it seemed like a good time to revisit my options. I came up with a good working solution, then the COVID-19 outbreak hit and I had to move everything online. Fortunately, the same method works well for recording lectures and posting them to YouTube.

Recently, I was working on an exam for a lab course, and wanted to ask a few questions about basic reaction setups. I had a harder time putting together simple figures than I would have expected. ChemDraw has some half-decent options but they’re useless if you need something they don’t already have and, let’s face it, those 3D flasks with the little logos are just trying to hard. After a few frustrating hours, I gave up, and decided that it wouldn’t be so hard to throw together the basics on my own.

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