BEYOND SCREEN CAPTURE: CREATING EFFECTIVE MULTIMEDIA WHITEBOARD LECTURES ON A TABLET PC

In many areas of study, researchers and educators often encounter concepts that are difficult to articulate in static, printed text. The goal of this project is to develop tablet PC software that enables the creation of rich multimedia content with which we can more effectively communicate these types of concepts. To this end, we have developed a program called LectureScribe that allows the user to create animated whiteboard lectures by simultaneously capturing voice and handwriting on a tablet PC or an electronic whiteboard. The resulting animation can be exported to a highlycompressed Macromedia Flash file for viewing over the Web on nearly any computing platform. While several screen capture software packages also allow one to achieve this same basic functionality, we argue that our program provides a much simpler, efficient, and intuitive interface for the particular task of creating animated whiteboard lectures. In this paper, we describe (sadly, in static printed text) the particular features that make LectureScribe easy to use, and we also comment on the experience of the author and his students in evaluating the overall effectiveness of using multimedia content produced with LectureScribe.