Tablets, smartphones, and digital notebooks have opened up a whole new way of interacting with digital devices. In the world of touch screens, your classroom documents truly become canvases for all sorts of creativity, and with the right stylus, ideas can come to life just like with pen and paper.
Kami and all of its tools can be used on any touch screen device and interact with all forms of styluses. Here’s how Kami works with a stylus and our top tips on how you can use styluses with Kami in your classroom.
How does Kami work with a stylus?
To understand how Kami works with a stylus let’s have a look at the mechanics of how styluses work. There are two main types of styluses that can be used on touchscreen devices:
Passive styluses: use a tip that can be detected by a touchscreen device (often called a capacitative tip). There is no communication between a passive stylus and the device, it’s essentially the same as using your finger but provides a bit more accuracy and control.
Active styluses: include both a capacitative tip and internal electronics that allows the pen to communicate directly with the device being used (usually using Bluetooth). This added connectivity means that an active stylus can provide more features to help you interact with your device. For example they may have: pressure-sensitive input, an eraser tip, differentiation between pen and finger touch, and much more.
All forms of stylus can be used with Kami to make your work more accurate and allow you to engage more naturally with its freehand features.
If you use an active stylus in Kami, the app will recognize it and let you know that your stylus has been detected (see screenshot below). This will automatically enable:
Palm rejection: This is where you can place your palm on the screen in a natural handwriting position and the device will not register it as a click.
Touch scrolling: With an active stylus you can scroll the page with your finger without having to change to the Select Text tool. This means you can move around your file whilst also drawing or using Kami’s markup tools.
Stylus eraser: If your stylus has an eraser functionality, Kami will recognize this and you will be able to erase without having to select the eraser tool.
Which stylus should you use with Kami?
With the huge range of stylus types available, which do we recommend for using with Kami? We were interested in exactly the same question so put our engineers to the task. After multiple rounds of testing using a range of devices and stylus styles, our team found their favorite.
The Kami team recommends the STAEDTLER Noris digital pencil.
The Noris digital pencil looks and feels just like a normal pencil, but works as an intuitive stylus on a range of EMR compatible devices. Using cutting edge EMR technology it works in the middle ground between active and passive stylus – communicating with your device but without the need for battery power. Specifically designed for the education sector and complete with a digital eraser, the STAEDTLER Noris digital is our stylus of choice for all Kami users.
We have even teamed up with Staedler to help you get access to these brilliant tools. Kami users can now get an exclusive discount on all STAEDTLER Noris digital orders by using our discount code KAMI2020. Learn more, or purchase your Noris digital here.
4 ways to use Kami with a stylus in the classroom
There are lots of ways you can use Kami with a stylus in your classroom. Here are some of our top tips:
1. Sketchnoting and freehand drawing: The Kami Drawing tool has been specifically designed to harness freehand creativity. With a stylus and Kami, your class can draw on any file type exactly as they would on a piece of paper – any document truly becomes your canvas! Students can choose the color, thickness, and transparency of the brush to suit any design. This is a particularly powerful tool for developing visual note-taking or sketchnoting practices.
2. Make accurate graphs in science and math: Styluses make creating graphs, plotting points and drawing lines of best fit easy within Kami. Use the Insert Grid Page option in Kami (shown below) to draw your own graphs from scratch or insert pre-saved ones into a Kami file using the Insert Image option. Students can then use the Drawing Tool and their stylus to plot points and draw graph lines, just as they would with a pen and paper.
3. Make diagrams, images, and maps interactive: Scientific diagrams, maps, and even historical images are an essential way to learn about processes and perspectives across many subjects. With Kami and a stylus, your students can engage more deeply with their learning materials by labeling, drawing, and adding notes onto any image or diagram in their Kami file. For example, they could label parts of a cell, compare differences between photographs, or even mark the progression of battles on a map – the sky is the limit.
4. Math working out: Sometimes thinking is just easier to do when writing with a pencil rather than a keyboard. This is most often the case in math where workings out are easier to jot down quickly with a stylus than format and type out into a text box. Use the Drawing Tool with a stylus in Kami to make completing math problems more intuitive and engaging.
