Whiteboard (or Blackboard or Greenboard) is an essential part of our teaching. No classroom is complete without a whiteboard.
A teachers creativity in explaining any complex concept is accomplished by using a simple tool i.e the whiteboard. Most teachers are extremely creative and talented as far as their graphic skills are concerned.
Most good teachers have great handwriting and excellent drawing skills. I am sure you would remember, your teachers who used the whiteboard to such an effect that they converted that boring white canvas into a portrait of pedagogic imagery with such ease that all looked crystal clear. No amount of multimedia and animation technology, can replace the magic that teachers create on the whiteboard.
So, be it online remote teaching methodology or physical classroom teaching, whiteboard is the most essential part of that experience.
Thus, I took upon a task of creating a low bandwidth whiteboard that could be used to teach online remotely. My whiteboard required the following essential features:
There are two flash components loaded here. On the top is the student view of the whiteboard, and at the bottom is the teacher view. You can use your mouse in the bottom view and see the drawing happening in the top view as well. Anyone else who has loaded this page and is drawing on the bottom view is also visible on your top canvas. Can you see any delay in your drawing the bottom view to it appearing in top view ?
A teachers creativity in explaining any complex concept is accomplished by using a simple tool i.e the whiteboard. Most teachers are extremely creative and talented as far as their graphic skills are concerned.
Most good teachers have great handwriting and excellent drawing skills. I am sure you would remember, your teachers who used the whiteboard to such an effect that they converted that boring white canvas into a portrait of pedagogic imagery with such ease that all looked crystal clear. No amount of multimedia and animation technology, can replace the magic that teachers create on the whiteboard.
So, be it online remote teaching methodology or physical classroom teaching, whiteboard is the most essential part of that experience.
Thus, I took upon a task of creating a low bandwidth whiteboard that could be used to teach online remotely. My whiteboard required the following essential features:
- Free flow drawing capability
- Real time sharing
- One Teacher -To- Many Students session
- Multiple simultaneous Teacher-Student sessions
- Paging
- Multiple colors
- Low bandwidth function
Low bandwidth requirement is the most important as you know it is a priority.
So, I set about devising methods to accomplish the fully featured whiteboard as per my needs.
Whiteboard Methodology:
To create a low bandwidth, real time sharing, multiple user, free flow drawing whiteboard, I decided to break down the functions of drawing into minimal actions set. So, when you use the mouse (or pen/tablet) to draw a figure on the computer screen, you do following basic actions:
- Move mouse to location on screen where you want to start drawing
- Press left button on the mouse to start draw.
- Drag mouse to actually draw
- Leave left button on the mouse to stop draw.
Using these basic four actions i.e MOVE, START_DRAW, DRAW, STOP_DRAW, you can create any figure including alphabets to write words and sentences or write mathematical symbols or draw flowcharts or graphs to explain co-relations etc.
So, all drawing can be done using these four actions.
Next step was to transport these basic actions in real time to another user who could see what was being drawn. After thorough research, I zeroed-in on flash technology and the power of Shared Objects as supported by Flash/Adobe Media Server. FMS provides a functionality to share information between various sessions in real time and at minimal bandwidth. So, I decided to send the basic actions along with screen coordinates through FMS shared objects to the student sessions. Thus, getting the basic functionality working.
FMS made it possible for low bandwidth, real time sharing, multiple user, free flow drawing whiteboard to be possible.
Further to add paging, I added some more actions like ADD_PAGE, NEXT_PAGE and PREV_PAGE.
and to add multiple colors, I added another action named CHOOSE_COLOR.
To get multiple sessions working together I used server side code to manage sessions and share information with relevant people connected only to that session.
Here is the demo of my efforts:
There are two flash components loaded here. On the top is the student view of the whiteboard, and at the bottom is the teacher view. You can use your mouse in the bottom view and see the drawing happening in the top view as well. Anyone else who has loaded this page and is drawing on the bottom view is also visible on your top canvas. Can you see any delay in your drawing the bottom view to it appearing in top view ?
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