Variety of modules

Tools that can visualise objects are invaluable for demonstrating concepts.

Your own scribbles are a good way to start organising your thoughts, but they’re not always helpful when trying to teach others. In many subjects, using tools to show what happens in reality works best. You may want to show how a scale works, and so an animation that shows a scale working would be useful when it comes to visualising objects.

OpenBoard excels at such tasks because it comes with a large pre-installed selection of modules with its regular install. You can also add pictures, video and, if you have the skills, your own “interactives”. To make your own there’s a JavaScript library you can use to create both graphical tools and quizzes. An entire test can be made using these elements, and there are many included examples to inspire you to create your own.

Rnote and Xournal++ contain imports that you can use to place images in your presentations. You can also create neat documents using the built-in LaTeX editor in Xournal++. Other than that there’s not much support for creating anything advanced on top of what’s bundled with the software.

Rainbow Board and Lorien only support pens and in Rainbow Board, a rudimentary text tool. These projects are, of course, very new so just delivering the simple interface handling the pen is the current focus. The future will tell where they go on this subject; it would be interesting to see Lorien add animation tools considering that the code is based on Godot3.

The type of modules that you want will depend on your goals for using these tools in the first place. At the end of the day, if all you want to do is have a place to scribble notes, then you don’t need modules.