Teaching, Technology, and Learning

Silverlight is Microsoft's version of Flash, and it is designed to be cross-platform and cross-browser. I installed and ran their demos on an XP machine with Firefox and had no problems.

The neat thing is that Silverlight supports ink! The "Page Turn" demo at this link caught my attention:

http://silverlight.net/themes/silverlight/community/gallerydetail.aspx?c...

For some time I've been wanting to make a lightweight active learning tool for the classroom. The idea is the instructor would make up some problem for the students to work through and save it as an image. This would allow the problem to contain images in addition to text. In class, the students would be on a computer, navigate to a web page, load up the problem, and then work it out in class. Ideally each student would have a tablet, but if text input was allowed someone could use a mouse and keyboard too. When they are done, the students would click a button to submit their work to their instructor, who could then share student submissions with the class by putting them up on a projector.

I realize you can already do this with systems like Elluminate, Dyknow, Ubiquitous Presenter, the Mines InkSurvey tool, and Classroom Presenter. But they're much larger systems designed for many more tasks. It seems like a really lightweight, easy to use, and simple to install, focused tool for just student submissions would be useful for in-class and distance courses.

I started downloading the SDK already; the hard part will be finding time this summer to work on it!