Previously I have discussed presenting and teaching using digital whiteboards instead of slides and mirrored screens showing tools and technology at work.

You can see some of these writings and rants here.

Recently, I found my favorite digital white board technology,  Jot for iOS and its most useful support tool www.jotwithme.com were somehow blocked at one of my regular presenting venues.   I was at a loss, just before a presentation started, I had to resort to a painful backup plan.  This involved directly connecting an iPad to a projector.    The initial connection took several seconds for the projector and iPad to recognize each other.   Part way through my presentation.  The iPad went to sleep and lost the connection,  it could not be re-connected in time to keep the discussion on topic…   It was frustrating to say the least,  and especially distracting.

Fortunately, I found another digital whiteboard solution:  AirSketch.

This iOS app does a few things which are wonderful:

1.  It appears to host the whiteboard locally, and allow your laptop on the same wi-fi network to see the presentation in a web browser.   This so far has worked on the same network that blocked the jot app from serving the whiteboard to the cloud.  I have not yet tested this for remote presentations.
2. It allows you to import and annotate pdf documents, so one could use a combination of slides and hand drawn images.  (I have yet to try this as I have discussed before linear slide shows can be too ridged in dynamic discussions and presentations).
3. It appears to lock in landscape mode.  so you can move around with the iPad without it flipping/turning the image as you draw/move.

There are still a lot of workflow details to test in the classroom/meeting space.