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

[David Van Assche]

Hi,
  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:
http://www.uweschmidt.org/wiimote-whiteboard) 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.

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 2:06 PM, Caroline Meeks <solutiongrove at gmail.com>wrote:

> +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.
>
> 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.
>
> On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 2:17 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
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
>> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Caroline Meeks
> Solution Grove
> Caroline at SolutionGrove.com
>
> 617-500-3488 - Office
> 505-213-3268 - Fax
>
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