If you only look at the the status of the documentation (especially in English), you would never guess how hard the people at Open Sankoré have been working. They have just released version 2.1 and after playing around with it for a bit, I have decided to give it a first try in a real course setting.
What it is
Open Sankoré is a free and open source Interactive White Board software. As far as I have found there are no other FOSS alternatives that cover the same functionality. If your are working in primary education (K12 in the USA), there are many interactive examples available. In my case I have prepared the entire presentation elsewhere and exported to PDF. I then import the entire PDF to Open Sankoré and have the starting point for the presentation.
Anything you do will be saved automatically with a date stamp. So there is no way to “forget to save” to take the notes and corrections home that you made during the lecture.
Keyboard Shortcuts
There is no reason to feel left out if you speak anything other than French. The francophone versions of the manual and other documentation are not up to date yet. And if you are looking for a fun writing project, then here is a project that you can really put a mark on and help many educators out there.
One thing I would like to add for reference are the keyboard shortcuts. You will need them if you want to add basic functionality to your Wacom (or other) tablet, so that you can work faster while giving the presentation or lecture. Through basic trial and error (and I still miss a couple, so do let me know if you have found more), I have found:
ctrl-g – Change to Pointer
ctrl-j – Change to Line
ctrl-k – Change to Write (text – box)
ctrl-m – Change to Marker
ctrl-e – Change to Eraser
ctrl-t – Toggle Tools
ctrl-d – Show documents
ctrl-b – Show board
ctrl-w – Show web browser (the open sankore browser)
ctrl-, – Show preferences
ctrl-o – Zoom Out
ctrl-0 Zoom to 100% (that is a zero)
ctrl-i – Change to Pen