Making educational videos with a drawing tablet

Drawing tablets are heavily used for creating educational content. For example you've probably seen the Khan Academy videos and those are created with a drawing tablet.

Easy tablet choices

For this you want high reliability and durability and you DO NOT need to spend a lot of money buying a fancy tablet. And for those reasons I'll keep the recommendations short:

What features you need

• Pressure support - Will help you strokes look more natural. All drawing tablets have this pressure support.

• Tilt - not needed for education use. More of an artist thing.

• Tablet buttons (aka. ExpressKeys) - I think they can come in very useful for people. For some people these are critical. No harm in getting them, you can always disable them.

• Size - Medium or Small. I always recommend medium. Even though some people are OK with small tablets, I do see a far number of people say the small size makes their hand feel cramped.

My recommendations

Pen tablets (no screen)

• One by Wacom Medium (CTL-672)

  • Pressure: YES

  • Tilt: NO

  • Tablet Buttons: NO

  • Wireless: NO

• Wacom Intuos Medium (CTL-6100 or CTL-6100WL)

  • Pressure: YES

  • Tilt: NO

  • Tablet buttons: YES

  • Wireless: Only the CTL-6100WL supports wireless

Pen displays (have a screen)

• XP-Pen Artist 12 GEN2 (CD120FH)

  • Pressure: YES

  • Tilt: YES

  • Tablet buttons: YES

  • Wireless: NO

• XP-Pen Artist 13 GEN2 (CD130FH)

  • Pressure: YES

  • Tilt: YES

  • Tablet buttons: YES

  • Wireless: NO

• Wacom One GEN1 (DTC-133)

  • Pressure: YES

  • Tilt: YES

  • Tablet buttons: NO

  • Wireless: NO

Which tablet does Sal Khan use?

Sal Khan uses a Wacom Intuos Pro Medium for his videos. That is an AMAZING tablet, but honestly overkill. You can get by with a much less expensive tablet.

Which specific model of Intuos Pro he is using?

It does NOT look to be the latest model of Intuos Pro Medium (PTH-660). You can tell this because in one of his videos he shows the tablet and I can see some things that clearly mark it as an older tablet.

• The pen does not look like the Wacom Pro Pen 2 that comes with the PTH-660

• The USB-cable connects with a thicker end and is not the L-shaped connector that comes PTH-660

• The back of the tablet has the older Wacom branding.

Note that the Khan Academy has this document What software program/equipment is used to make Khan Academy videos? In that doc, they say he uses a Wacom Bamboo tablet. I suspect this probably was true at some point, but he clearly no longer uses it.

Resources

• Teach with Khan - Sal's Tips for Creating Blackboard Videos for Remote Learning - this is the video where he shows that he uses Wacom Intuos Pro Medium tablet.

• Khan Academy - Be Like Sal: 3 Ways a Tablet Can Energize Your Digital Teaching! Dec 9, 2020

• ClassPoint - Best Way to Use Wacom Tablet for Online Teaching with PowerPoint [One by Wacom] Dec 2, 2020

• Joshua Tarbutton - My Workflow for Recording Khan Academy Style Lectures Mar 28, 2020

• Be a Better Dev - How to make Khan Academy Style Videos for YouTube Sep 26, 2020

• GRUMO - Teach with a Tablet (Full Tutorial + Demo) May 26, 2020