Classroom Presenter is a piece of software that has been developed by the University of Washington from 2003-present. The software is integrated with the Microsoft Research ConferenceXP Project.

This program was developed by the Computer Science & Engineering Department at Univerosty of Washington to provide a virtual classroom for the University's students. It appears to be very featureful and is appreaching maturity as a product. As of this fall, it is deployed in classrooms at the University of Washington.

Good Features:

• Tablet-Based interactive classroom
• Students can draw answers to teacher's questions in-class and 'submit' those to the teacher for review. The teacher can then go through and select which answer he or she wishes to be shown on the screen.
• All of the drawings done during lecture
• Software solution includes plugins for popular slide-preperation software (Microsoft PowerPoint to allow the teacher to specify if they are preparing 'Base' slides, or if they are making notes that only they can view.
• Simple selection of drawing tools
• Simple interaction layout.
  • Drawing Tools
  • Slide View/Drawing surface
  • Slide 'filmstrip' preview bar on the side (Instructor View only) with
• Ability to have more than one slide deck loaded at the same time, that can be selected by changing tabs.
• 'Whiteboard Deck' Button to create extra space around the slide content.
• Ability to add new blank decks during the class (i.e. a new whiteboard deck)
• Ability to extend the number of slides in a deck by simply moving to the 'next' slide (which brings it into existance). This is useful for extending the whiteboard decks without having to erase markup.
• Ability to render deck to a series of images
• Students' submission of inked slides shows up as a new deck of slides that the instructor can browse through.

Bad Features:

• Relies heavily on Microsoft Software, specifically ConferenceXP, WindowsXP, and all the APIs of both. Could be difficult to port to other platforms.
• ALL of the drawing tools are free-form ONLY. There is no support for drawing any sort of regular shapes, or for 'improving' the stroke quality for those who are poor at drawing.
• Semi-manual connection process on the part of the student. Student must select to connect to a certain classroom, i.e. The student has the choice to do a non-sensical action before the class has even started.
• Far too much available menu interaction on the part of the student, including setting preferences, etc.
• Slides are "broadcasted" to student's tablets at the beginning of lecture. This means that if a student comes in late, the slides have to be re-broadcasted to their tablet, as opposed to be served up on demand whenever the student needs them.
• Slide broadcasting is slow. A multi-megabyte deck will take 'a long time'.
• It is possible for student tablets to 'miss' ink strokes, or even whole slides from the Instructor's machine.
• Best implemented version appears to be ONLY using multicast. There doesn't seem to be a mechanism to retrieve lost data, or to confirm that all the data was recieved.
• Multicast connections don't route very well across different networks, which would make it very difficult to extend to the point of being able to log on remotely.
• No ability to edit ink except to erase it.
• The User Interface is said to be lacking by instructors and students that have used it

Missing Features

• No class list with the ability to see who is here and who is not
• No support for audio recording or tagging
• No automatic slide preperation from outline
• Slides are static, and do not have Dynamic Level of Detail
• No ability to render a deck to a pdf
• No user-specific login informtation
• No ability to do animated diagrams

• Transactional 'ink' sumbission from the student to the teacher, as opposed to trying to manage 30 peoples' doodles simultaneously. The students explicitly choose which inks to send to the teacher as opposed to the teacher being able to see everything that the student writes. The corallary to this is that when the lecture is saved, only the submitted inks are saved with the lecture.