[IAEP] classroom presenter, iTalc for sugar (possible ports for LinuxTag Berlin showoff)

[David Van Assche]

Hi,
   At LinuxTag Berlin, there are 3 areas that are of particular interest to
me, and might be considered novelties in the way sugar can/will be presented
there. From one side, I will be representing sugar packaging on the openSUSE
platform, and being part of the opensuse-edu team, we will show off not only
the live suse sugar cd/usb stick, but also the tight integration (including
desktop launch icon) of sugar within the openSUSE 11.1 educational spin.
Since kiwi-ltsp (A mature variant of LTSP 5) is quite integrated in the
educational desktop, as is ejabberd, we will show off LTSP sugarised, with
the approximately 50 sugar activities that have been packaged for openSUSE.
Within the LTSP framework, we often use an application called iTalc, which
allows for the remote administration (vnc on steroids) of desktop sessions,
locking of sessions, passing around of sessions (for the classroom
environment) as well as, intra station messaging (in case a particular
station needs administrative help/training/support.) Right now, it runs
great on the administrator machine, which doesn't need to and won't run
Sugar. Basically from this view one can see screenshots of each desktop and
by clicking on the desktop in question, one takes over or shares that
session with that particular sugar user. There is more explanation and
screenshots here: http://italc.sourceforge.net/
On the client side, it would be nice for someone to study how hard it would
be to port to sugar. Its not massively important since it runs from gnome,
but for scenarios where sugar is the only Desktop Environment, it would be
nice to have this kind of controlling mechanism for the teacher/admin. For
example, the teacher could collaboratively work on one session connected to
a projector, and pass that session on friom student to student, with each of
them carrying out some task. I have seen it used this way under Gnome with
great success, and as Sugar is collaborative by nature, it seems like a
perfect fit. So any sugar porting takers?

On another note, I have successfully tested the home made whiteboard option
using a wiimote and infra red pens. This approach allows for the building of
an interactive whiteboard for under 50 euros. Unfortunately, the best
software to use for something like this is classroom presenter, originally
windows software allowing one to open a powerpoint/impress presenation and
then draw upon that using the infra red pen. Classroom presenter was ported
to sugar at one point. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Classroom_Presenter , but
I'm not sure about its current status, only that it doesn't currently work.
Again, it would be nice to fix this activity so we can show it off at
LinuxTag and show people how to create a cheap sugarised interactive
whiteboard for under 50 euros. If someone is interested in getting this
activity working again for Sugar, that would be great.

kind Regards,
David (nubae) Van Assche
www.nubae.com
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