5 Best Annotation Tools For Teachers (2026)

Updated August 2026

Being able to draw on what you are showing is one of the few genuinely load-bearing bits of presentation technology. Circling the term you just defined, or arrowing to the one line of code that matters, does more for comprehension than another slide.

The tools below all do real-time annotation — drawing over live applications, web pages and documents while you present. They are not screenshot-and-edit tools, which are a different category and a poor fit for teaching live.

Before you install anything: check what you already have

A surprising number of teachers install an annotation tool to do something their existing software already does. Worth checking first:

• Zoom has an annotation toolbar during screen share.
• Microsoft Teams supports annotation on shared screens.
• PowerPoint has pen and highlighter tools in presenter mode.
• Windows and macOS both ship basic markup for screenshots and PDFs.

Install a dedicated tool when you need to draw over anything — a browser, a PDF, a piece of software, a video — rather than only inside one application. That is the gap these tools fill.

Quick comparison

Desktop annotation tools

Epic Pen — the easiest one to pick up

Epic Pen puts a drawing layer over your whole screen. You can write, draw and highlight over presentation software, web pages, videos, creative applications and games, without clicking through to the software underneath — the annotation layer does not interfere with what is running behind it.

The interface is a small toolbar rather than a set of memorised keystrokes, which is why it is the one to start with if you have not used a tool like this before. It supports custom hotkeys alongside the toolbar, and has full pen-pressure support for brush size on drawing tablets and pressure-sensitive input, which makes it a good fit for interactive whiteboards and Windows tablets.

Cost: there is a free version, and Epic Pen Pro with a 14-day free trial. The Pro tier adds the more advanced drawing tools on top of the free pen, eraser and highlighter. Check the current feature split on the vendor’s site before assuming a specific tool is in the free tier — this is exactly the detail that changes between versions.

Platform note: Epic Pen began as Windows-only and a macOS version is now available. The Windows build remains the more complete of the two.

ZoomIt — free, and the best zoom

ZoomIt is part of Microsoft’s Sysinternals suite, written by Mark Russinovich. It is a screen zoom, annotation and recording tool built for technical presentations and demos: it sits in the tray and activates with customisable hotkeys to zoom into an area, move around while zoomed, and draw on the zoomed image.

That zoom behaviour is what makes it distinctive. Most annotation tools let you draw on the screen; ZoomIt lets you magnify a region first and then annotate it — the difference between pointing at a small detail and actually making it readable from the back of a room. There is also a draw-without-zoom mode for annotating at native resolution, and a break timer that keeps running when you tab away.

It has grown well beyond zoom and draw. Current versions also do full-screen and cropped screen recording to MP4 or GIF, OCR text capture from a region of the screen, LiveZoom and LiveDraw modes, and a DemoType feature for scripted typing during demos.

Platforms — this changed: ZoomIt was Windows-only for most of its life. Microsoft now also ships it inside PowerToys, and there is a separate ZoomIt for Mac build on GitHub. Touch and pen input work for drawing on tablets.

The trade-off: ZoomIt is driven by keyboard shortcuts rather than a visible toolbar, so it has a real learning curve. If you want to point and click, start with Epic Pen. If you will learn five shortcuts, ZoomIt is free, lightweight and hard to beat.

ZoomIt shortcuts worth memorising

You do not need the full list — these are the ones that cover almost all classroom use.

The blur pen is the one most teachers do not know about and immediately want: it lets you obscure a name, a mark or an email address on screen before the class sees it.

Cost: free, from Microsoft.

OpenBoard — a full whiteboard, free and open source

OpenBoard is open-source teaching software built around an interactive whiteboard, designed for schools and universities. It works with an interactive whiteboard, in a dual-screen setup with a pen tablet and projector, or on an ordinary computer with no extra hardware.

It is released under the GPLv3 licence and maintained by its community on GitHub, and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux — the only tool here that covers all three. No registration is required to download it.

Beyond the whiteboard itself, you can open a document or web page directly inside OpenBoard, or use its toolbar to annotate over other applications, and capture parts of your annotations to save or drop into a board.

Worth knowing about its origins: OpenBoard was forked from Open-Sankoré 2.0, itself based on Uniboard, specifically to refocus the software on classroom teaching and ease of use.

Cost: free. Genuinely free — open source, not a free tier.

Browser annotation extensions

Annotate — the classroom-oriented option

Annotate is a Chrome extension backed by a wider platform. It lets you annotate web pages, PDFs and Google Slides while presenting, including in Google Meet sessions, and can pass control to students so they can annotate and share their own screens.

You can annotate Google Slides in both edit and present modes, with annotations tracked per slide, open PDFs from Google Drive via Open with Annotate, and save annotations into a notebook in your account.

Hypothesis — free, open web and PDF annotation

Hypothesis is a free Chrome extension for annotating web pages and PDFs. It is widely used in higher education for collaborative reading — a class annotating the same text and seeing each other’s notes — which is a different job from live presenting, and a genuinely useful one if you set reading.

Choose Annotate if you want to draw over a page while presenting to a class. Choose Hypothesis if you want students marking up a text together.

Also worth knowing: Kami

Kami is a widely used classroom annotation and PDF tool with a Chrome extension, aimed at marking up documents and worksheets rather than drawing over arbitrary screens. If your annotation need is mostly “students write on a worksheet”, it is a better fit than any of the screen-overlay tools above. We cover it alongside other classroom software in our guide to the best apps and tools for online teachers.

Which one should you actually use?

Five tools is more choice than most teachers want. Pick by what you are doing, not by feature count:

• You mostly present slides and want to circle things. Epic Pen. The toolbar means you can use it in your next lesson without preparation, and the free tier covers pen, eraser and highlighter.
• You teach anything where detail is small on screen — code, spreadsheets, diagrams, maps. ZoomIt, for the zoom-then-annotate behaviour. Nothing else here does it as well, and it is free.
• You want a whiteboard, not an overlay. OpenBoard. It is the only option here that is a full teaching whiteboard rather than a drawing layer, and the only one that runs on Linux.
• Everything you teach from lives in a browser tab. Annotate, especially if you use Google Slides or Google Meet — but check the free-plan limits before relying on screenshots or the laser pointer.
• You want students marking up a shared text. Hypothesis. That is collaborative reading rather than presenting, and it is free.
• You are on a locked-down school machine. Start with the browser extensions — they are far more likely to be permitted than a desktop install, and ZoomIt can be run without a full installation.

If you only ever install one, Epic Pen is the safest default for classroom presenting and ZoomIt is the best free one for technical subjects. Neither takes more than a few minutes to try.

What happened to Web Paint

Earlier versions of this guide named Web Paint as the overall best Chrome annotation extension. Its Chrome Web Store listing now returns “Item not available” — the extension has been removed from the store and cannot be installed.

We are saying so rather than quietly deleting the section, because Web Paint is still recommended by a lot of articles and you may have arrived here after failing to install it. If you were looking for it, Annotate or Hypothesis are the closest live replacements, and Epic Pen covers the same need outside the browser.

The general lesson: a browser extension can vanish without any announcement, and a guide has no way of knowing unless someone re-checks. Before trusting any tool recommendation, click through to the store or vendor page — if it errors, treat the rest of that article’s picks with suspicion too.

Frequently asked questions

Why can’t I save annotations using the Annotate add-on?

You need a notebook to save into. Open your Annotate dashboard, click the plus sign in the bottom-right corner to create a notebook, then open it — you can then save annotations from your page into that notebook. Note that the free plan caps how many saved annotations you can keep.

What is the best free annotation tool for teachers?

For drawing over your whole screen on Windows, ZoomIt is free with no tier above it. For a free interactive whiteboard on any operating system, OpenBoard is open source and genuinely free. For browser-only annotation, Hypothesis is free. Epic Pen and Annotate both have free tiers with paid upgrades.

Can I annotate over any application, or only presentations?

Desktop overlay tools like Epic Pen and ZoomIt draw over whatever is on screen — a browser, a PDF, a video, a piece of software, a game. Browser extensions only work on web pages within that browser. Choose based on whether what you are annotating lives inside Chrome or not.

Do these tools work with an interactive whiteboard or pen tablet?

Yes. Epic Pen supports pen pressure for brush size with drawing tablets and pressure-sensitive devices, and OpenBoard is designed for interactive whiteboards and pen-tablet-plus-projector setups. If you are teaching with a tablet display, these two are the strongest fits.

Will my school let me install these?

Desktop tools need permission to install software, which on a managed school machine usually means your IT team. Chrome extensions are often controlled by an admin allow-list. If an install silently fails or the extension does not appear, that is almost always a policy restriction rather than a fault — testing on a personal device confirms which quickly.

Working with slide decks? See also: how to edit or convert a .ppsx file.