Andreas was watching my recent Enterasys DCI webinar and got intrigued by the quick hand drawings I made, so he asked me “What kind of tool do you use to make the hand drawings during your presentations? It must be something different than a mouse.”

In case you weren’t watching one of my recent webinars, here’s a sample to get you started:

The magic tool in that I use is Wacom Cintiq 12WX interactive pen display. It connects to my PC as the second monitor that I use as the presentation monitor for my PowerPoint presentations, and the pen acts like a mouse.

PowerPoint allows you to draw on slides (move the mouse when you’re in slide show mode, click the barely visible pen icon in the bottom-right corner and explore the options), and GoToMeeting shares that whole screen with the audience. On top of that, Camtasia Recorder records the Wacom Cintiq screen and my audio.

Could I use WebEx instead of GoToMeeting? Not sure. Tried to do that on a Mac and got WebEx totally confused – it could not share the screen I wanted. Never had a single screen-sharing glitch with GoToMeeting.

Could I use some other software, not PowerPoint? Absolutely. I’m using SketchPad to draw the diagrams in my interactive videos.

Could I use GoToWebinar recording instead of Camtasia Recorder? Absolutely not. Every single virtual classroom software that I tried has totally useless codec/bitrate settings that you cannot change. These tools are aimed at people that are too distracted to get a proper headset, and since the voice quality sucks anyway, they don’t complain about the quality of the recording. Would you be willing to listen to several hours of bad-quality recordings? I wouldn’t.

BTW, this is the headset that I use (hat tip to Greg Ferro for recommending it). It’s a good headset, but the real trick is in the foam that covers the mike. Another headset from Plantronics produces way too much background noise to be usable.