How UP works

What the instructor does
What students do

What the instructor does

UP combines the best of PowerPoint-style presentation and whiteboard-style free-hand writing.

Making slides

Slides can be created in PowerPoint or converted from pdfs. A Power Point add-in allows the instructor to designate whether an object on a slide should be visible to students and instructor, or instructor only.

In class

The instructor uses a Tablet PC and runs Presenter software. Using the Tablet PC's extended display mode, UP generates two video outputs, one to the instructor's screen (the instructor view) and one to the projector (the student view). The instructor's view includes control elements such as a slide filmstrip, ink colors, erase, undo, whiteboard (which provides a blank slide for free-from inking), and slide shrink (which provides blank space around the slide margins). The lower portion of the slide in this example is 'instructor only' (a property set in PPT before export), and is not projected to students. Here’s the view projected to students. Here’s the slide after in-class inking by the instructor. If the instructor enables student submissions, they are visible through a filmstrip similar to the one showing the instructor slides.

Screenshot of UP running on the instructor's computer before adding ink. The lower graph and text in the instructor’s view are instructor objects, and are not visible to the students.
page6_1

View that is projected to students. Notice that the lower graph and text in the previous slide are not shown here... they are only shown to the instructor.
page6_2

And here's the same slide, fully inked. The graph drawn on the slide was essentially traced over the instructor object, a convenient technique for ensuring proper scale. A student's question about acceleration led to the creation of the upper (red) graph.
page6_3
See more examples of instructor ink in class.

What students do

Students can review all slides and ink on the web (screenshot below), and use the web to submit work to the instructor.
page14_1
UP automatically sends all slides and ink to the web in real time. During class, students can use this web page to make text-, ink-, or image-based submissions on the instructor's slides. The instructor can review and then project submitted slides to the class and add additional ink, so that material generated by students can be a focus for discussion. See examples of student submissions.