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I have taught for years using UW's Classroom Presenter software, hacked up to be more responsive and usable with a tablet and pen. So I'm fully on board with th
by kevhito 11y ago
I have taught for years using UW's Classroom Presenter software, hacked up to be more responsive and usable with a tablet and pen. So I'm fully on board with the concept.
But frankly, the execution seems lacking. The qrcode/sms polling is fine, if you care about that sort of thing, but there are many similar and better solutions [1] out there.
You can already mirror and do remote displays easily even with stock powerpoint/ooffice/keynote.
The one feature this and UW CP really bring is the annotation. In UW CP, especially my hacked version, the annotation tools are very good quality. You can use an active pen (e.g. wacomm digitizer on a Lenovo laptop/tablet) for accurate writing and drawing, and it has very low latency response, pressure sensitive line width, etc. In software you can zoom slides, delete/move annotations, change colors and pen types via a tablet-friendly palette. You can save your annotations and import them back into ppt as "ink" objects, and vice versa.
I don't see any of that in the poster's demo. The drawing is clunky, unresponsive, and looks bad. Can you imagine trying to write a note on a slide with that system?
Having worked on the guts of UW CP, I know that one of the hardest things was export/import from powerpoint. It is very hard to get right, especially with build animations. Font size 24 doesn't export correctly in many cases. Margins and objects shift and move slightly. Exporting can be very slow -- many seconds per slide, depending on complexity. Parsing the actual pptx files and replicating the actual look without using powerpoint APIs is essentially impossible.
- twoslide 11y agoThanks for the feedback (ouch!). I agree that the app is not-suitable for fine-grained drawing, and for target users specialised hardware won't work. I'm curious about the link referenced in [1] - there is polling software out there (e.g PollAnywhere), but it is limited to polls. I think the text responses and future developments (image uploads, audience-designed slides) could provide better interactivity. Yes, powerpoint import/export sucks. Import is functional in terms of pictures and text, using python-pptx. Export is probably a longer-term goal and not a high-priority (if people want to make pptx, powerpoint is always going to be the best option).
- aroch 11y agoThere's TurningPoint as well, and it integrates with the office suite + the Student-Teacher backend (D2L, blackboard, etc): https://www.turningtechnologies.com/higher-education https://www.turningtechnologies.com/higher-education
- kevhito 11y agoSorry about the missing reference. I was thinking of (a) classroom clickers, (b) poll everywhere, which as you point out is limited to polls, and (c) UW CP's student feature, which allows more interactivity but requires students to install the UW CP client on a laptop or tablet. Big picture, I'm sure you are right that there is a lot of unexplored/unexploited classroom tech that could leverage smartphones and sms for better collaborative and interactive work. Incidentally, if you are looking for powerpoint export, the best way I found was to basically to export each slide as an image, including every animation step. Pathetic, slow, but mostly reliable.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]