Classroom Presenter 3.0 Beta

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Classroom Presenter 3.0 We are pleased to make the Beta version of Classroom Presenter 3 available. This is a complete rewrite of Classroom Presenter. CP3 has a number of improvements, including using a more reliable mechanism for networking. We believe that the Beta version of CP3 is at least as good as CP2, so we encourage users to try it out. We also welcome feedback, including advice on how it could be improved, requests for features, and especially, bug reports!

What's new in 3.0

• The inking has been rewritten to use the Real Time Stylus. This allows a much smoother inking, and also gives a performance improvement on long ink strokes. The most noticable change is the continuous rendering on the public display when projecting directly from the instructor machine.
• CP3 supports both broadcast and client-server communication. The weakness of CP2 had been wireless communication - CP3 is proving to be much more robust in a wireless environment. Connection methods for both mechanism are given below.
  • For broadcast communication, we have added acknowledgements and rebroadcast. This has improved the the reliablility of the broadcast communication in wireless environments.
  • The system also includes TCP/IP networking. In the current version, the instructor machine is the server, and all the viewers connect directly to the instructor machine.
• It is possible to load directly from a PPT instead of using deck builder. Although there currently is a deck builder for CP3, our plan is to move all the deckbuilder functionality to Classroom Presenter.
• We have added text based input - so users can type responses as well as use ink. The reason for this is to make the system easier to use in a mixed deployment, where some users have tablet pcs and others have laptops.
• Images are handled in a different way from CP2, which should allow larger PPT files to be used, as well as PPTs with richer backgrounds. The size of the CP3 files is roughly the same as the original powerpoint.

• We have not attempted large scale tests - so we do not know how will it will work with a large number of users. Using unicast networking, preformance problems seem to occur with about 20 machines.
• We have not developed a PPT plugin for Office 2007 - thus, instructor notes need to be created using an older version of PowerPoint.
• Features such as Replay and QuickPoll from CP2 have not been implemented yet.

Basic Connection sequence

1. Click Instructor under Stand Alone
2. Click Start a New Presentation
3. Load CP3 or PPT file.

1. Click Instructor under Networked
2. Click Start TCP Server
3. Click Start a New Presentation
4. Load CP3 or PPT file.

1. Click Student or Public Display under Networked
2. Under Available Presentations, Click Join (several presentations may be listed)
3. Click Join the Selected Instructor's Presentation (it may take a few minutes for this to become active, if other machines are also connecting)

	Computer Science & Engineering University of Washington Box 352350 Seattle, WA  98195-2350 (206) 543-1695 voice, (206) 543-2969 FAX [comments to anderson]