On-screen annotation

Draft

Introduction

On-screen annotation software allows to annotate screens and its applications and save the result. It can be categorized as a both a kind combination of presentation software, whiteboard, screen capturing and note taking tool. Teachers, for example, also may be interested in tools like Classroom Presenter, e.g. an ink-based collaborative annotation system.

Such software is very useful for teachers who present a mix of software, pictures and other stuff and who don't want to spend time preparing slides vs. preparing cool teaching activities and useful materials....

Features such a system may have are:

• Various drawing tools such as highlight, pen, arrow, rectangle, text box and free hand
• Be able to delete and move objects, undo
• Smooth on/off
• Capture of the whole screen and/or a region (preferably in editable format, but here we are dreaming)
• Works with any software (including applications like CS5 or web browsers)
• Some sort of focus tools (e.g. a spotlight/laster equivalent)
• magnification areas

Software

(no guarantee - Daniel K. Schneider 20:12, 31 March 2011 (CEST))

General purpose

• Netop pointer (PC/Mac) Seems to be one of the two the best tools I have seen.

• Annotate Pro. Seems to be one of the two the best tools I have seen. See the feature list

• Utlimate Pen (Mac) “Ultimate Pen can be used for drawing on just about anything, it is particularly useful when working with presentation software. You may add notes, draw shapes, make comments, or add illustrations directly on the screen.” $ 20.

• ScreenMarker “s a little piece of software that lets you make annotations on your computer screen.” (Warning: difficult to know who is behind this ....)

Web browser annotation

These tools typically allow for collaborative/share annotation in various ways.

• See Wikipedia's comparison of web annotation systems

• Makeuseof has a list of top web annotation tools.

Links

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