Hi,<br> Caroline, that is exactly how iTalc works. The teacher can pass on the session to one or groups of students, so it becomes a great way for everyone to join in. If you are going to be at LinuxTag, I can do a quick demo so u can see how this would work in a real teaching environment. I have also been testing the wiimote whiteboard solution, which is truly outstanding. The solution works better than I had projected (no pun intended) and though I have not been able to run it inside Sugar yet, Classroom Presenter is a great tool for this. Basically its like having a really big touchpad on the projection screen, and up to 4 people can use the infra red pens at once. Again, this allows for some pretty neat collaborative abilities. Tony Anderson is working on the next version of Classroom presenter which should also be able to read out slides. He will be at LinuxTag, and hopefully we can put together some kind of demonstration of how the wiimote works with it. Same goes for iTalc and LTSP. So its all looking good... The wiimote whiteboard software runs on Linux, Windows and Mac (more info here: <a href="http://www.uweschmidt.org/wiimote-whiteboard">http://www.uweschmidt.org/wiimote-whiteboard</a>) with up to 2 concurrent pens, smoothing callibration (how straight a line u can draw) and basically turns an infra red pen into a mouse pointer. By using single click and double click u can pretty much control the computer from the projector screen, including doing really neat stuff in gimp, sugar-paint, inkscape, and classroom presenter. Even things like google earth being controlled this way is very very cool. The cost of all the necessary items is under 50 euros, so this is truly an amazing solution that can be adopted in 3rd world countries too. For the same functionality, you'd normally be paying thousands of euros, and the stuff would still require extra licenses, etc. All the software to run this is free, and I hope we can get some more testing done in this area at LinuxTag, including a moodle tutorial, and how/where to get the software.<br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 2:06 PM, Caroline Meeks <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:solutiongrove@gmail.com">solutiongrove@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
+1 on the importance of iTalc like functionality. If that is something Windows/Apple can do and Sugar can't its going to hurt adoption.<br><br>It would be cool if students could also become the presenters so the teacher could ask a student in the room to explain how a problem was done and pass control over to that student for a while.<br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote"><div class="im">On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 2:17 AM, David Van Assche <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:dvanassche@gmail.com" target="_blank">dvanassche@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br></div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div><div></div><div class="h5">
Hi,<br> 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: <a href="http://italc.sourceforge.net/" target="_blank">http://italc.sourceforge.net/</a><br>
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?<br>
<br>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. <a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Classroom_Presenter" target="_blank">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Classroom_Presenter</a> , 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.<br>
<br>kind Regards,<br>David (nubae) Van Assche<br><a href="http://www.nubae.com" target="_blank">www.nubae.com</a><br>
<br></div></div><div class="im">_______________________________________________<br>
IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)<br>
<a href="mailto:IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org" target="_blank">IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org</a><br>
<a href="http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep" target="_blank">http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep</a><br></div></blockquote></div><font color="#888888"><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Caroline Meeks<br>Solution Grove<br>
Caroline@SolutionGrove.com<br>
<br>617-500-3488 - Office<br>505-213-3268 - Fax<br>
</font></blockquote></div><br>