Activstudio

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Activstudio is a software application designed specifically for teachers and presenters who use an interactive whiteboard. It was designed and implemented by a team at Promethean (Blackburn, England) led by Nigel Pearce, the project's chief architect and innovator.

[edit] History

Activstudio has its roots in an earlier version named PandA (an acronym for ‘Presentations and Annotations’) which was first released in March 1996. This program became popular in secondary schools within the UK in the late 1990’s.

The first version of Activstudio was released in the UK in February 2001. This version replaced and expanded upon the features of PandA. Activstudio v2 was released in March 2004 and Activstudio v2.5 was released in February 2006.

The derivative application Activprimary, (comprising a sub-set of the Activstudio functionality) was released for the primary education sector in January 2004.

Activprimary won the Worlddidac award for Software Innovation in 2004 and again in 2006.

[edit] Description

Activstudio provides a suite of ‘whiteboard centric’ tools. The main feature is to allow the user to prepare and present flipcharts, an electronic document that can contain a combination of vector and raster object data including lines, shapes, rich text, images, video and other third party document types. The flipchart also captures and stores any notes (termed ‘annotations’) which may be written on the surface of the whiteboard using an electronic pen. Additionally the program allows the user to write (or ‘annotate’) directly over other applications including Office documents and video clips.

Activstudio is generally accepted as the flagship for many of today’s standard ‘whiteboard centric’ concepts, including the spotlight, revealer and zoom functions, the resource library and the interactive protractor, ruler and compass tools.

Activstudio is available in 17 languages and is being used by over half a million people worldwide. The program is available for most versions of the Windows and MAC operating systems.

There are many flipcharts for Activstudio uploaded to the internet. A quick search should provide a good starting point for any teacher just starting out with an Activboard.

[edit] File Format

Both the applications Activstudio and Activprimary maintain all material created for the interactive whiteboard within the 'flipchart' file format. This file is a proprietary format having the file extension '.flp' which utilises the PKZip compression technology in order to reduce flipchart file sizes.

www.prometheanworld.com