Activstudio
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Activstudio is a software application designed specifically for teachers and presenters who use an Activboard, Promethean's interactive whiteboard. Activstudio and the derivative product Activprimary were designed and implemented by Nigel Pearce together with a software development team at Promethean (Blackburn, England).
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[edit] History
Activstudio has its roots in an earlier version named PandA (an acronym for ‘Presentations and Annotations’) which was first released in March 1997 and became popular in secondary schools within the UK in the late 1990’s. PandA was based loosely on the multimedia presentation application Creator.
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, (similar in functionality but offering an interface aimed towards the younger learner) was released for the primary education sector in January 2004.
Activprimary won the Worlddidac award for Software Innovation in 2004 and again in 2006.
Version 3 of Activstudio and Activprimary were released in January 2007.
A number of prototype, simultaneous, multi-input whiteboard techniques were developed in June 2006. Many of these ideas were first exhibited at the NECC, Atlanta, in July 2007 and were included in Activstudio and Activprimary versions 3.5 (released Sept 2007). New features include shared concept mapping and dual flipcharting.
Version 3.6 of Activstudio and Activprimary were released in December 2007.
[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 FLASH 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 includes integrated tools to centrally manage additional interactive inputs including remote annotation and telepointing using wireless handheld Activslates and Activote Student Response Devices.
Activstudio is generally accepted as the flagship for many of today’s standard ‘whiteboard centric’ concepts, including the spotlight, revealer and zoom functions, sound recorder, the resource library and the interactive protractor, ruler and compass tools. A large selection of editable Restrictors, Properties and Actions that can be edited on screen through simple clicks enable the easy creation of interactive multimedia.
Activstudio version 3 added point and click object authoring capabilities, gesture recognition, an optional Windows style interface and better links to Promethean Planet via a digital dashboard.
Activstudio and Activprimary are both available in 32 languages and 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.
