Hello,

I've been reading through the various discussion forums trying to find a solution to a particular issue. To explain:

I work as the network manager at a school in Cambridge, England. Like most schools in the country we have a number of "Interactive Whiteboards" - pen-based input devices, about four meters square, attached to a classroom wall and with a computer screen projected onto it (basically, think of an extra-big USB drawing tablet nailed to a wall, with a computer screen projected on it to make it look like a large TV screen).

The idea is that these devices get used by the teacher instead of a standard whiteboard + dry-wipe pens. You use a special pen (or, in some models, just touch the board) to draw on the screen.

Each different brand of interactive whiteboard comes with its own drivers (to make the pen act like a standard PC mouse) and "whiteboard software", which is where the problem starts. This whiteboard software lets you create lesson resources, with pages of text and images all set up ready for the teacher to click through and add hand-written annotations to as they explain stuff to the pupils. However, each brand of interactive whiteboard, although otherwise quite generous with the licensing of the software ("Smart" brand software, for instance, is basically free), specifically prohibits the use of their software on any pen-based input device not made by that company. So this means you can't get "Smart" software and use it on "Promethian" boards, for instance.

The reason for this is obvious - the whiteboard companies, reasonably enough, want to flog as many whiteboards as they can. The idea seems to be that one teacher gets a whiteboard, starts creating lesson resources, other teachers see how nifty interactive whiteboards are, start clamouring for one they can use with the already-created resources, and before you know it you're buying whiteboards for the whole school and you're stuck with one particular brand.

Obviously, this is bad from a school's point of view - we want to be presented with a bunch of whiteboard manufacturers all vying to sell us hardware as cheaply as possible.

The solution to this problem would seem to be to get hold of some interactive whiteboard software that would work on any brand of whiteboard (or with other, cheaper, devices such as wireless pointers). It'd be nice if said software could also integrate nicely with VLE systems such as Moodle.

So, I had a look at what people are working on in Moodle's discussion boards. I've found several mentiones of whiteboard software, but all seem to be related to communications-system whiteboarding, which is a different application.

Therefore, I've started to write a simple whiteboarding application in Flash to replace the whiteboarding software provided with branded interactive whiteboard hardware (whiteboard.swf file should be attached to this post).

A few notes:

 - This software is not finished yet. Currently, you can simply draw lines on the screen with the mouse pointer (bear in mind that this software is designed to be used with pen-based devices, mice will prove a tad fiddly). You can change the line thickness and colour and there is an undo feature.

 - The idea of this utility is not to create a full-blown content creation application capable of editing detailed images and animations. Rather, I want something that can allow teachers to load already-available content into an ordered set of pages that they can page through and add their own annotations to whilest teaching a class. It's dead easy to load Jpeg and SWF files into a Flash movie, those could simply be loaded into the background to allow the teacher to draw over the top of them.

 - Lines drawn can be stored as XML. The test application posted has a smily face drawn on screen, this is reproduced from an XML string (currently simply hard-coded into the application). Therefore, it becomes easy to load in pages of notes from a web server, with no server extensions needed (you need a basic bit of PHP coding to be able to /write/ XML files to a server, though), and also to use SCORM to hold whiteboard state information. This means that a Moodle module could be created to allow a teacher to make notes, save them as a session, set that session as a SCORM assignment for their pupils, then pupils could go home and add their own hand-written notes on top of the teacher's, with those notes stored via SCORM. This also means that such a Moodle-created exercise could easily be exported as a standard SCORM module for use in other software.

I know that there are several projects around looking a creating whiteboarding applications for communications purposes, but those all seem to require server software extensions of some kind. It does strike me that surley there must be an existing project somewhere that I could just nick the drawing tools off, though.

Comments and further ideas appreciated.