Hi everyone,
I’m a new math teacher, have recently discovered Obsidian (so still a beginner) which I happily use for keeping track of class activities (tests, action items, topics taught, …). I use Obsidian with Tasks, starting Daily Notes, Advanced Tables (I really lack an easy “tables” feature…). That’s where I am.
I’m creating my courses as we speak, and want to make the best possible choice in terms of format. I don’t like Word, I’m well acquainted to LaTeX… and I’m wondering if Obsidian would not be a great option to host everything, courses included?
This would allow me to link courses topics with student diaries, tests, … all of that on an open and readable format. On the other other hand, I’m afraid to lose the “printer friendly” aspects of it. I’m also unsure that Obsidian is a good fit for large documents, or to dynamically include parts of them (chapters, …). Starting it is a great momentum. Once chosen, migrating would be very difficult.
Are there teachers who can recommend the format they use? Is going “all the way Obsidian” one step too far?
I’m placing all my prep into obsidian for the first time this spring, so I don’t have an actual “here’s what worked, here’s what didn’t” answer myself. But I can say that I’ve used it successfully for course documents using the PDF export. For example, if I have my students read an article, I’m showing them (eventually) my literature note for it. Callouts/admonitions do create a nice document, though my personal notes are not WCAG compliant so I do use higher contrast colors in my classroom documents.
If you’re talking about a pseudo-LMS (you mention “host” and “linking”) I’m not sure. But increasingly my course content is an interaction between my PDFs, notes, and my LMS (which will accept markdown and html), and less about word (and we’re a so-called “Microsoft shop”).
I’m a technical trainer and do training material quite often. Obsidian does have a slides feature or plugin and supports latex out of the box using the “$$” syntax. I’ve not tried the PDF export myself, but most of my slide material is in jpeg image format already (exported from Visio or powerpoint) which works well. Having interlinked material may be more tricky, so it might be better to use the publisher mechanism for that although it’s a paid feature, but not expensive. There is always the option to create some diagrams with mermaid as well which allow direct linking but you need to do a lot of editing work to get that to work right within obsidian as the commands needed are not strictly mermaid ones. Send me a PM if you want more info on those.