E-Chalk Talk

Although electronic whiteboards come in several sizes and shapes, their main function is the same – to capture written annotations, notes and drawings and store them for future reference. This is accomplished with infrared sensors, radio-signal-emitting pens, plasma overlays and other technologies. The end product is a file of digitally stored notes that can be e-mailed, posted online, or printed and handed out to an audience immediately after a presentation or training session. Beyond these basic features, some electronic whiteboards are interactive – letting you connect a computer and projector to the whiteboard to combine its features with common software programs. A Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, for example, can be projected onto an interactive whiteboard where it can be marked up with colored pens to highlight important numbers or trends. Or, using an interactive whiteboard's touchscreen feature, a presenter can navigate the Web using a finger to move the cursor and double-clicking with taps on the screen. Even videoconferencing functions have been integrated into electronic whiteboards in the past year.

Regenold, Stephen. Presentations (2003). Articles>Education>Multimedia>Videoconferencing

A Review of Digital Video Production in Post-Secondary English Classrooms at Three Universities  

Digital video production in composition courses is both new and exciting. However, this newness comes with challenges and obstacles as well as more questions than answers. What exactly is so fun, attractive, liberating, and transgressive about digital video work? Is it the time invested in editing minutes or hours of footage into seconds of film clips? Is it the sheer thrill of having the power to overlay images, words, and sounds to produce an effect impossible in the real world and highly effective in the multimodal, rhetorical one? Is it that the composition teacher is finally asking for a product where grammar (understood as punctuation and sentence structure) is mostly invisible? Is it the crisis moments when the software, the hard drive, and/or the accompanying hardware crashes and we are still left with a classroom full of students to teach? Or, is it the mesmerizing effect of the screen that promises sustained attention to a composition assignment? The answer, we think, in all cases is 'yes'--yet sometimes that yes is a hesitant one.

Meeks, Melissa and Alex Ilyasova. Kairos (2003). Articles>Education>Multimedia>Video