How a Screen Annotation and Zoom Tool Helped My Students Focus
Before I started using a screen annotation tool, I spent a full minute trying to point at an underlined “x − 3” for a seventh grader during an online tutoring session. “Where?” he asked. “That part — the one with the underline,” I said. Except the underline only existed on my screen. He was reading from his own copy of the worksheet. In person, I could have leaned over and tapped the page. On a video call, all I had was a cursor, and a cursor cannot point at something on someone else’s screen.
That moment made me look for a better way. A colleague recommended a lightweight screen annotation and zoom utility. It’s a small program that sits quietly in the background. When I press a hotkey, it enlarges whatever is near my cursor. It also gives me a brush so I can draw a circle, an arrow, or a quick underline on top of whatever I’m showing. Then I press the key again and the screen settles back to normal. No learning curve, no heavy installation, no visible presence when it’s not in use.
The first time I tried it with a student, we were working on a word problem for ninth-grade math. The problem had a table of distances and three follow-up questions arranged around it. On a full screen, that’s a lot of competing text. I hit the hotkey, the table grew large, and I drew a circle around the column labeled “distance.” “Start here,” I said. “One piece at a time.” There was a pause long enough that I worried I’d confused him more. Then he said, “Oh — okay.” It wasn’t a breakthrough in math. But the next few minutes had a direction that the earlier ones didn’t. We zoomed in on the next question, pulled back out to look at the structure of the problem, and zoomed in again. We didn’t get lost.
The zoom works because it shrinks the field of possibilities. A screen full of text, numbers, and buttons can look like a wall of noise for a student who hasn’t yet learned to filter distraction. When the zoom narrows the view to one focused block of text, the task becomes less overwhelming. It’s the same reason a teacher clears the whiteboard before starting a new example. Zooming clears the screen without actually clearing anything.
With younger students, the level of zoom matters. A fourth grader I worked with told me, not long after I started using the tool, “It helps when you make it bigger.” Kids are often honest about what works. And it clicked: a ten-year-old needs more magnification than a fourteen-year-old. The younger the student, the smaller you want the area of focus to be. Because the tool adjusts easily, I can zoom in close for a third grader and barely magnify anything for a high schooler. It’s a small adjustment, but it’s made me pay attention to how each student takes in a screen.
The drawing brush was the part I was most skeptical about. I expected to use it mainly to point out errors, circling what a student got wrong. But I’ve found I use it just as often — maybe more often — to mark what’s already right. “That step is fine,” I’ll tell a student, and while I say it, I’ll put a box around it. It’s more specific than a verbal “good job.” It shows the student that I’m looking at the work carefully, and it gives them a clear reference point for the next step. A circle around a correct answer sends a different message than a circle around a mistake.
The same tool has found its way into parent presentations. Our school holds an evening session each fall to walk families through the new parent portal. In earlier years, a presenter would stand at a podium and gesture vaguely at a projected screen while parents tried to find the right tab on their own screens. Now I project my laptop screen, zoom into the navigation menu, and draw a colored circle around the “Payment” tab. Everyone is looking at the same area. No one is squinting or feeling bad for not knowing where to click. It’s a simple shift, but it respects people’s time.
One mother told me she started using a similar tool at home to help her daughter with an educational game. The menu screen had many small icons, and her daughter kept clicking the wrong spot because the button she needed was a small green circle in the corner. The mother drew a circle around it, and her daughter clicked it right away. It was one of those small everyday frustrations — the kind you try to solve with printed instructions or a well-worded hint. What actually worked was someone clearly indicating the spot on the screen.
The tool has limits. It won’t rebuild a student’s attention span. It won’t fix a poorly explained lesson or make a confusing concept clear on its own. If the math itself is weak, making the visual fields bigger won’t save the session. But it does one thing reliably: it makes sure we’re looking at the same thing. That’s a bigger deal than it sounds like in online teaching, where so much of the difficulty comes from all the moments of misalignment.
What surprises me is how few people know these tools exist. There are plenty of them, mostly small and inexpensive, and they never seem to come up in the standard advice about teaching tech. It took a colleague’s suggestion for me to find one. Now it’s part of how I run every tutoring session. It changed my teaching more than any new curriculum I’ve adopted.
I still have moments where focus slips. A student will say “there” at the same moment I’m zooming into something else, and for a few seconds we’re still in different corners. Those moments are rarer now. The tool is there when I need it, ready to press a key, draw a circle, and move on. I didn’t know I needed it until I tried it, and now I wonder what other small, unnoticed tools are out there, fixing the next gap I haven’t yet noticed.
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