Inking on Web Pages - Discussion

Hi! I am an ESL teacher. Inking on web pages is an awesome feature of assistive technology to highlight ideas and concepts for research and reading comprehension, for just  for instance .  I used to work with it very much.

Elliot Kirk 

I would use the inking feature to annotate articles I have to read for school. I'd also use it to do my math on Khan Academy/Deltamath to write directly on Edge instead of having to tab over to OneNote and write my work there.

Elliot Kirk The whole reason I went from Mac to PC was because of the notes feature on Edge. Had I known this would happen, I would have never bought my Yoga 730.... This feature needs to come back soon otherwise I will be going back to Mac, and telling people to do the same.

Please add the feature that allow user to ignore touch input for drawing feature when they are using a pen. thanks

Elliot Kirk  This feature was a selling point when it released, and made Edge unique. I personally don't understand how difficult it must be to just add it back considering it worked so well in the previous versions. Id personally like to see it as a setting, have it automatically turned off in the settings and let people toggle it on if they want it. I feel like the customization aspect is a win win for everyone. 

I used it a lot, as an art student and for personal research. Id doodle on Bing images, highlight and underline articles, sketch on the borders of webpages.  Legitimately any time I wanted to mark something up or even had a thought, its became useful.

Saving pages as a PDF just to use a pen tool is understandably more confusing and time consuming.

Elliot Kirk  A good non-education example (I worked in ed for 20+ years, ran an annual international workshop/conference on digital ink use in education for much of that time, and implemented three digital ink based 1-1 programs at schools in the US and Jordan, so I have strong opinions there--but this isn't that realm.) was a web article I was reading last night for a discussion group tomorrow. I ended up printing the article from the immersive reader view to get a better layout and plenty of white space just so that I could annotate it with comments and questions to bring to the discussion. I could have printed it to OneNote, but I don't really need to keep it after tomorrow and the extra steps involved to do that and then later delete it were more complicated than sending it to my printer. It would have been far better onscreen with my Surface and the multiple ink and pen options than with paper and a single highlighter and pencil. Assuming I could duplicate the screen and show different parts of the article side-by-side, paper really would have no advantage at all. Plus, being able to use external reference sites or programs (either side by side or just by app switching) on the device would be a big improvement. Especially if I could cut and paste either content or URLs onto the annotated web page from those resources.

As a college student, I have a lot of online classes and textbooks. It was extremely helpful to be able to draw on any webpage and save it. I used it especially for calculus. The function on the old version was perfect and worked perfectly. Going into this new semester I am extremely upset this is not available anymore Elliot Kirk 

Elliot Kirk  A few months ago, after I installed the new version of Edge and discovered the pen was gone, I uninstalled it and got the pen back. This morning, the new version was back again without any action by me. Now I can't uninstall it. It's bad enough that we have to teach in these very difficult circumstances. Why do you take away the tools that make our lives and jobs just a little bit easier? I have already posted about the way I used the pen but is there a way to get the old version of Edge back...again?

Elliot Kirk   I use the ability to write on web pages all the time.  At work, I use it to write on screenshots of different types of equipment to identify parts as I work at a technical college (i.e. picture of a forklift and pointing out the different aspects; electrical wiring and drawing arrows to show flow of electrical current etc.)   I also use it privately when I teach in my Sunday School class.  I highlight text out of scripture, pull up maps of areas we are discussing and pointing out land features or locations of major events, drawing routes traveled (i.e. Exodus, Paul's missionary journeys etc.).  I use it multiple times a week and have become quite dependent on it.  Honestly, its the reason why I use Edge over Chrome or Firefox.  Without it, I'll go back to Chrome.