Abstract:

The common problems concerning lecture presentations include one-way static transfer of information from teacher towards students, uncomfortable ways of active presentation, low students' engagement with no feedback, and static or no access to presentation materials. This contribution presents four years of experience in the effort to the improve lectures using different presentation applications and several pen-based technologies. In general, the pen-based approaches enable to improve lecturers’ presentations in the sense that the presentation can be made more attractive to students, can be created/modified interactively with students, or can even be turned into active learning. The university specific conditions have to be considered when searching for the suitable solution:
• lectures usually take place in several high capacity auditoriums,
• the auditoriums are most often opened for students also outside lecture time, therefore the expensive solutions are not appropriate,
• some lecturers have the presentation materials prepared in advance in various formats (e.g. word or pdf) and would like to use them,
• some lecturers prefer on the spot writing and expect just the comfortable blackboard replacement,
• the rest woud like to combine prepared materials with on the spot writing.

We started with the Interactive whiteboard by Luidia equipped by an eBeam Interact software. This technology allows to navigate within, annotate on top of, and capture from any computer application using the eBeam stylus on a whiteboard. Although this is very convenient solution for small to medium classrooms, in auditoriums of 150, 300 or even more seats is not very suitable. Using the external tablet or special active display to replace the whiteboard and one data projector is possible but not ideal solution. However, considerable advantages to this solution brought the replacement of whiteboard and the eBeam stylus by Tablet PC (Personal Computer). This versatile, easy to move solution is usable at any time and any place, it is more comfortable and the projection screen is always fully visible. Other presentation applications like Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, DyKnow and CP3 (Classroom Presenter 3.1), the software developed at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington have also been tested with Tablet PC. All the tested applications can be characterized by poor import possibilities, making thus the previously prepared materials, other then PowerPoint presentations useless.
Although the CP3 has poor presentation editing capabilities compared to other tested environments, it is the only open source software and allows on line presentations sharing and interaction with students. Some extensions were designed and implemented into the CP3 to meet our basic import/export and presentation editing requirements.
The main features and our experience with using the enhenced CP3 will also be presented in the paper. The practice indicates that the interactive presentations made the explanation of study material in the course much easier and illustrative, at the same time increasing the course attractiveness and students’ involvement in learning process. For teacher it is a big motivation to give lectures to students that are interested in the presented material. On the other hand, the students can easily get the presentations, e.g. modified directly during the lecture and store them for further reading.

Keywords:

Tablet PC, interactive presentation, wireless network communication, digital ink, Classroom Presenter.