Making live presentations
Use these programs to create a presentation or interactive discussion.
When giving a presentation, LibreOffice Impress would likely be your first choice. However, the fact that pre-prepared slides are necessary makes it unsuitable for certain settings. You’ll have difficulties if you want to change slides during a presentation. In contrast, these whiteboard programs enable you to draw objects as you go through your presentation. You can also use them to lead the discussion or add ideas on the fly. None of these solutions have multi-user capability, though.
With all that in mind, you should know that for education, OpenBoard outshines them all. This comes as no surprise when you realise that the project’s origin is from educational institutions in France. With the earlier mentioned “interactives”, you can show all the objects you need in OpenBoard. If you want to show a video, just dump it on the board and click Play. There’s even a built-in browser to show relevant web pages during the seminar.
Nothing compares to OpenBoard when it comes to presentations, but with Xournal++ you can get fairly close using images and external documents. Surprisingly, Rnote has great annotation capabilities for PDFs, which could be used for highlighting within the presentation document.
Rainbow Board and Lorien lack such capabilities. Given that they’re young projects this isn’t surprising. Time will tell if they’re interested in going down that route. Before that happens, you’ll have to combine them with other tools or use the more advanced programs covered in this RoundUp.
As mentioned earlier, multi-user capabilities would be a great addition. These functions exist on many related online systems. This all makes sense since you’d only be able to share when you have a network to share over. If you start with sharing everything on a web page it’s logical to have everyone join in the fun.