I'm currently teaching lessons using a laptop and a beamer instead of the blackboard. Current Linux configuration I use include:

• a laptop with Ubuntu
• a small Wacom tablet
• Xournal or Jarnal (see below) to “write” over the screen through the wacom tablet and/or to annotate pre-defined slides (in PDF)
• the script “lessons.pl” (see below) to record audio (and video, in case) of the lessons.

Some notes (in italian) on the different tools experimented for these “electronic” lessons may be found here. More general discussion concerning the usage of a laptop and a beamer to teach different arguments may be found at this page.

Recently I moved to a different configuration. I always use the Wacom tablet with xournal, by I foudn very practical to record a video of the lessons with the program [http://www.maartenbaert.be/simplescreenrecorder/!simplescreenrecord]] whichi is working pretty fine. In case I just want audio, I still keep using ecasound.

I maintain some tools providing the possibility to test programs written in the DRISC assembler language presented at the 2nd year course of Computer Architecture.

I'm using this perl script to register the lessons I teach using the computer and the beamer as a blackboard. This version runs under Linux and depends on

• scrot (a screenshot package)
• avconv (a video converter (was ffmpeg))
• ecasound (a sound recorder)

Any other set of tools supporting the creation of bitmap screenshots, registering audio from internal mic and building video from frames adding some synch sound track will do, provided you change the strings representing these commands in the Perl script.

Since academic year 2009-2010 I'm using my laptop and a beamer instead of the blackboard to teach my courses.

I use all open source software running on major operating systems (I personally used Mac OS X for two year, then I switched to Linux, but the software runs also on Windows).

The software allows to keep an independent “show” window on the beamer, while on the laptop you use another window to write (portions of) the beamer window. This allows you, as an example, to keep open a freemind map windows with the lesson notes as well (or any other support material) which is not seen by the students on the main beamer window.

The software I use to write on the beamer windows supports:

• freehand writing
• text input via keyboard
• cut&paste operations
• usage of any PDF as a backgroud

The freehand input is achieved using a small Wacom tablet or one of those “magic pens” supporting mouse input through USB (see below).

The following snapshots illustrate the situation.

This is what I see on my laptop screen:

The big windows is the input window. On the top bars you may choose pen kind, pen size as well as all the other tools available.

The beamer window (you should use the double screen mode of your laptop, of course) in this case was the following one.

The small window at the top left on the laptop screen shows you the portion of the beamer window you are currently operating on with the main window. The slider in the small window may be used to move the operating region. A detail of the small window is shown below.

As you can see, the small window hosts a view of the whole beamer window. The slider rectangle (the red one) can be moved with the mouse. The operating region may also be changed with the slider bars on the input window. While writing to the input window the small slider window is update in real time.

The software used is build on top of jarnal, a Java notetaker and PDF annotator. This may be downloaded as a .jar file and all what you need to run it on any system (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows) is a Java runtime.

Actually, jarnal only supports basic note taking (handwriting) and PDF annotation features. The double window system has been added by Zeno Grandi during a stage I supervised some time ago. Zeno software may downloaded from this link as a collection of jar files.

In order to run the software you therefore only need:

1. to download the software (this includes the jarnal.zip file, no need to download it again from the web site)
2. unpack it
3. enter the directory “distrib”
4. run the command “start” from the shell prompt

Last but not least, as student often ask me to record lessons using small MP3 devices placed on the desk, I decided to provide by myself the MP3 recordings of my lessons. To the purpose I use Audacity:

• it works perfectly (tested on Mac OS X and Linux, recording up to 2 hours)
• it saves recorded audio in chunks of about 2 mins, that you can easily recover in case of crashes or of any other inconvenience
• directly supports production of MP3 files out of the recordings
• succeeds producing files of about 50M for a 45 min lesson

Any laptop with the supporting dual mode video output will work (that is any laptop, basically).

As input device, I use(d) two distinct devices:

• a (USB) Wacom tablet. This requires writing on the tablet with the tablet pen while looking at the screen. It took some time to practice, but eventually this demonstrated to be really feasible.
• a digital pen, connected through USB. This is a device that looks like a normal pen, but hosts a radio talking to a small USB device (a little bit larger than a USD disk device) that has to be fixed on top of an A4 paper with a clip. What you write on the paper may be uploaded on the laptop (drivers for Mac OS X and Windows only) or you can write on the paper and passing the coordinates of your writing as mouse coordinates to the laptop, which is the mode I used to write in jarnal. Unfortunately, the model I have only supports A5 writing in “mouse mode”, which leaves you with just a small portion of the paper being used.

Using a tablet you can of course directly write on the screen. You need a tablet supporting Java and a decent screen output, actually, which restricts possibilities. In principle, being plain Java, Jarnal may be recompiled for Android, but the user interface needs consistent reworking.

On the AE and SPM didawiki pages, you may navigate the PDF files of the courses I gave this year using the tool.