Whiteboard overlay for live math and STEM instruction

A teacher is mid-lesson in any video conferencing tool and needs to write a derivative or draw a circuit diagram. The built-in whiteboard lags behind every stroke, the drawing tablet isn't recognized, and there's no way to type LaTeX or MathML inline. They either abandon the idea and talk through it verbally, or they prep a static slide — which kills the spontaneous, responsive quality that live instruction depends on.

This gap persists because the whiteboard inside a video conferencing product is an afterthought. The primary buyer of Adobe Connect or Amazon Chime is an IT administrator or L&D team buying for general business meetings. STEM teachers are a minority use case, and their specific input needs — tablet drivers, mathematical notation, multi-page scrollable canvases — are too specialized for a general vendor to prioritize. The result is a structurally neglected feature that no general vendor has incentive to fix properly.

What users actually complain about is precise: drawing tablets only work with the mouse input layer, not the whiteboard input layer. Switching from whiteboard back to a slide presentation wipes the drawing. There's no way to type math script 'like in Microsoft Word right on the whiteboard.' These aren't polish issues — they're deal-breakers for anyone teaching calculus, physics, or engineering live.

A standalone annotation and whiteboard layer that sits on top of whatever conferencing tool is already running — injected as a browser extension or desktop overlay — doesn't compete with the conferencing software. It augments it. Teachers already pay for their conferencing tool; they'll pay separately for something that makes their actual teaching work. The need recurs every single class session, which makes it subscription-friendly. Tutoring businesses and online course instructors face the exact same problem at scale, giving it a clear B2B path beyond individual teachers.

What to build

Build a browser extension and desktop overlay that injects a low-latency drawing canvas over any video conferencing tab, accepts Wacom and XP-Pen tablet input via the Pointer Events API, supports inline LaTeX rendering via MathQuill, and persists the canvas state independently of what the presenter switches to in the underlying conferencing tool.

Where to start

Start with freelance math tutors on tutoring marketplaces who already pay for tools and complain loudly in tutor community forums — they're reachable, vocal, and one good demo video of LaTeX rendering live on a whiteboard will spread organically in those communities.

The hard part

Tablet input via the Pointer Events API works inconsistently across operating systems and tablet driver versions, meaning early users on Windows with older Wacom drivers will have a broken experience that looks like your bug, not a driver conflict — you'll spend disproportionate support time on hardware compatibility before you have enough users to justify it.

How it makes money

Monthly subscription per teacher, around $12-18/month, with a free tier capped at 30 minutes per session to drive conversion.