Dear Otto: How Can I Highlight a Document

tech questions
Do you have a tech question?

Dear Otto is an occasional column where I answer questions I get from readers about teaching tech. If you have a question, please complete the form below and I’ll answer it here. For your privacy, I use only first names.

One of my readers was making a presentation and wanted to know how to highlight the screen for her audience and/or spotlight information. When she sent the question, I didn’t have a solution, but have since come across several I want to share with you.

PointerStick

I love this tool I discovered thanks to Rick over at What’s on my PC. This is a portable tool that presents on the Windows Desktop as a virtual pointer stick. It’s freeware, requires no log-in, and minimal installation.

Awesome Highlighter

Awesome Highlighter lets you highlight text on web pages and then gives you a small link to the highlighted page.

It has a downside, though: Every website I want to highlight must go through Awesome Highlighter’s page. There is a Firefox add-on that allowed for direct highlighting, but when I tried that, it said it was incompatible.

So I found it OK, but a bit clunky.

Any ideas?

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Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-18 technology for 30 years. She is the editor/author of over a hundred tech ed resources including a K-12 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum. She is an adjunct professor in tech ed, Master Teacher, webmaster for four blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice, CSTA presentation reviewer, freelance journalist on tech ed topics, contributor to NEA Today, and author of the tech thrillers, To Hunt a Sub and Twenty-four Days. You can find her resources at Structured Learning.

Author: Jacqui
Welcome to my virtual classroom. I've been a tech teacher for 15 years, but modern technology offers more to get my ideas across to students than at any time in my career. Drop in to my class wikis, classroom blog, our internet start pages. I'll answer your questions about how to teach tech, what to teach when, where the best virtual sites are. Need more--let's chat about issues of importance in tech ed. Want to see what I'm doing today? Click the gravatar and select the grade.