As I continue to explore options for using Zoom for teaching, one thing I like a lot is that I can connect my laptop to a monitor and only show one of the screens on Zoom. This way I can easily control what my students can see and I can leave some “cheat sheet” or bullet points that I won’t forget on another screen. But the great time of remote teaching is going to end eventually. I think I would definitely miss this convenience.
I am thinking if I can do the same thing for a face-to-face lecture. Maybe for some classrooms, I can attach my laptop to another monitor. But for most classrooms, I probably don’t have this option. While searching online, I found someone uses an iPad as a monitor. I tried this one on my big iPad (my laptop is running 18.04). To my surprise, it runs quite well (when the connection is good). On my iPad, I am using VNC viewer and I have very few complaints with it except the mouse location does not precisely sync with where I touch the screen. What is more encouraging is that it works very well even for my 9-year-old iPad mini. I have let it idle in my cabinet. And I didn’t expect to find some very good use for it. Compare with my bigger iPad, it is lighter and it serves well just to display my “cheat sheets”.
Update:
Surprisingly, even my Kindle fire works! But I tried three vnc clients only one of them works. The one that works is VNCClient. And I didn’t even pay attention that the KIndle fire has a very high resolution (2560X1600). I just tried 1280×800. It works quite well.