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UW Classroom Presenter, developed by Richard Anderson et al. at the University of Washington, is interactive presentation software that runs on tablet PCs. Each student uses his or her own tablet PC, can see written annotations made on the slide by the instructor (called “ink”) and can add his or her own ink to slides which can be submitted back to the instructor to be reviewed or shared with the class. In my undergraduate capstone project at the University of Washington, I worked with several other students to develop a version of Classroom Presenter that runs on the One Laptop Per Child foundation’s XO laptop.

The software is not just a port but a complete adaptation to make it usable on the XO. The XO is not a tablet, so only simple drawing with the trackpad (or a mouse) is possible. We added text input features to enable students to provide a textual response to a question without needing to write it with a mouse. We use the XO’s built-in facilities for discovering shared activities and connecting to other machines, so that connecting the machines together is simple enough for elementary students to do themselves. We also included features necessary for setups that don’t include a projector: the original UW Classroom Presenter expects that if the teacher wants to share a student’s submission with the class, he or she will use a projector to display it. In our implementation, we enable the teacher to broadcast selected student submissions to the rest of the class, so students may view them on their own screens.

The project culminated in a trial at a local elementary school, where students in small groups shared XO laptops to complete activities about a recent field trip, while the teacher talked about the students’ work and shared their submissions with the rest of the class.

Links

• UW Classroom Presenter
• Mark Ahlness’s blog entry on our classroom trial

Conclusions

The results of the trial were very positive; we received great feedback both from the teacher and from his students. The source code we developed has been made available under an open source license.

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