Lunch and Learn: Interactive Whiteboards in the Classroom

In this Lunch and Learn ses­sion, Janet Temos and Angel Brady of the Edu­ca­tional Tech­nolo­gies Cen­ter gave an intro­duc­tion to the SMART Tech­nolo­gies SMART Podium (for­merly Sym­podium) and the iPad, and how they can be used as inter­ac­tive white­boards for the classroom.

Janet demon­strated the SMART Podium con­nected to a Mac­Book Air.  Run­ning the SMART Tech­nolo­gies Note­book soft­ware on her laptop,she mir­rored her lap­top screen on the SMART Podium and anno­tated directly on the screen using the Podium’s teth­ered pen. The Note­book soft­ware pro­vides choices of pen color, line style, and even cre­ates slideshows that can be shared with a class after the lec­ture. Images and Pow­er­Points can be imported into the Note­book soft­ware, anno­tated and saved, even uploaded to Black­board. ETC has a SMART Podium that can be bor­rowed for class­room teach­ing. You can find more infor­ma­tion on the SMART Podium here: http://www.princeton.edu/etc/services/.

Angel demon­strated how the iPad can be used as a white­board in a class­room. To project the iPad screen, a spe­cial don­gle is needed to con­nect to the room pro­jec­tor; on non-enterprise net­works, it is also pos­si­ble to use a tech­nol­ogy called Air­Play together with an inex­pen­sive AppleTV unit to wire­lessly trans­mit the iPad screen to a device with an HDMI con­nec­tion. She then showed how the iPad can be used for teach­ing, demon­strat­ing sev­eral slideshow ‘apps’, includ­ing Google Drive, Slideshark, CloudOn and Explain Every­thing.

The iPad can also be used as a tool to anno­tate PDFs and slideshows. Two pop­u­lar ‘apps’,   GoodReader  and Papers (which con­nects to research data­bases), were demon­strated. All of these appli­ca­tions con­nect to ser­vices such as Drop­Box or pro­to­cols such as Web­Dav (Princeton’s Web­Space uses web­dav) to save and share doc­u­ments and presentations.

Finally Angel answered a ques­tion she often hears in her job at the NMC: “How do I dis­play my course reserve videos that are in the Flash for­mat?” Angel demon­strated a Flash browser app called Puf­fin. This browser allows iPads to play web-based Flash videos  (which the Safari browser native to the iPad can­not). The ETC also has a solu­tion to stream and play video on the iPad by prepar­ing the video through the campus-based Kaltura media system.

A sum­mary of the apps dis­cussed and demon­strated at this talk are located here: http://blogs.princeton.edu/etc/2012/12/06/using-your-tablet-in-the-classroom-an-app-summary/

The video of the talk:

Video Man­age­ment, Video Host­ing, Video Stream­ing, Video Plat­form