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

[Sean DALY]

Very interesting David, thanks

I can't wait to see that at LinuxTag.

Sean


On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 8:17 AM, David Van Assche <dvanassche at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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