A Pen-based Presentation Tool with a Unified Interface for Preparing and Presenting and Its Application to Education Field.

Abstract

This paper presents a presentation tool that allows the user to prepare the material and present it to the audience using pen-based computers in a unified interface. Computer-aided presentation is becoming popular, but there still are situations where exisiting presentation tools are not very popular, for example lecturing at schools. We investigated the reasons and identified two problems. One is that it is difficult for inexperienced computer users to create slides using keyboard and mouse and the other is that it is difficult to flexibly modify the contents or the flow of talk during presentation.To address these problems, we propose a pen-based presentation tool “KOTODAMA,”which is designed for pen-based editing in both preparation phase and presentation phase. The system allows inexperienced computer users to prepare the matrial using simple handwriting and provides basic beautification functions. The system also allows the user to edit the material by simple handwriting and to change the flow of the presentation on the fly. We performed a two-year longitudinal user study in elementary, junior-high, and high school classrooms to assess the effectiveness of our system. We obtained the users' feedbacks and design implications that are nesessary for developing practical presentation tools in such fields. © 2006, Japan Society for Software Science and Technology. All rights reserved.