The problem of using a laptop and a beamer to give classroom lessons my be solved by considering two different aspects:
In case you want to make available an audio or audio/video record of you lessons, you need to consider also another aspect:
Let's consider the three aspects separately.
The blackboard software is the software supporting the presentation of handwritten, ASCII or picture (cut&paste) material on the screen.
Two categories of software must be considered:
The former kind of software basically oblige you to show everything you do on the screen to the students, including writing tools setup (e.g. changing pen size or color), window switching to capture material to be shown, etc. Furthermore the dimensions of the beamer “balckboard” coincide with the dimensions of your screen and you are in general obliged to pack material in tight ways on the screen to avoid changing page too frequently, which is not a good strategy for the lesson and for the student attention.
The latter kind of software allows you to operate on the laptop screen at a different resolution w.r.t. the one used on the beamer, and in general show on the beamer only the final output of what you draw/write/paste on the laptop screen.
Sample software only working in “mirror mode”:
Sample software supporting dual screen mode:
All the software packages listed above support writing the blackboard contents on the disk in PDF.
Most of them support the usage of PDFs as background, and therefore support annotation of slides prepared with other tools.
Different input devices may be used to input hadwriting into the blackboard software. I personally experimented:
These are cheap, very robust, easy to transport (200g) and work with any operating system. As the tablet are passive devices, you must “write” on the device and look at the results on the screen, which initially requires a little bit of practice. Excellent results at the end. See this video.
These are quite expensive devices that look like a flat monitor and connect to both Laptop (video and USB) and beamer (video). The beamer shows what is shown on the interactive screen, and the interactive screen shows what's sent by the laptop (therefore either the same screen (mirror mode) or a different one (dual mode)). The usb connection sends to the laptop “pointer” status. The pointer may be moved on the interactive screen with a pen device. See this video (the laptop uses mirror mode, what you see on the laptop screen and on the interactive pen video is also shown on the beamer).
These are cheap and very light devices, with a small device to be connected to the USB port on the laptop anc clipped on top of an A4 page and a pen used to write on the page. The writing is delivered to the laptop either as mouse events or captured by specific software. The pen usually works on batteries, while the receiving device works on internal batteries re-charged via USB. (video in preparation).
Working with a laptop, you usually have available the laptop front camera and the laptop mic to record video and audio. However, you are not usually interested in recording your face and voice, but rather you voice and what's going on on the screen.
Different screen capture programs are available, depending on the operating system used.
Under Linux, I use a combination of tools that include
while under Mac OS X I succesfully used the (non free) Camtasia tool.
Sample lessons: