I am confident that my technical knowledge is overrated! I mostly look things up. But in an email from a colleague I was asked:
Do you know interactive tools like wooclap to use in conferences / courses that are open source?
First I had to just look up to Wooclap to find out its a presentation/interactive tool for use with audiences, classes, etc. Something like Mentimeter or Slido.
There are probably a lot of options depending on the exact kind of interaction desired- does it need mobile access? Live data display? Probably.
It’s out of my range, but a bit of searching via alternativeto got two possibilities, spotting two listed as open source, notably both from Germany
I’ve never heard of Wooclap (nor Mentimeter or Slido)… but based on the description offered, have any of you played with the in-built interactive tools in BigBlueButton, like collaborative shared whiteboards, ability to run quizzes and polls ad hoc or pre-defined, ability to select random respondents from the audience, and a whole lot of other things? https://bigbluebutton.org is an incredible Free and Open Source Software tool, designed specifically for interactive teaching, development of which happens to be led from Ottowa, Canada… We have a couple instances of BigBlueButton and I’m sure we’d be happy to make it available to anyone who wants to try it out.
It’s a product that has been developed down the street here in Bratislava, Slovakia (their global HQ is still here), and a couple of folks there are acquaintances.
More to the point – I sometimes search GitHub for clones and it turns out that there are a few Slido clones that are actually half decent, see e.g. Search · slido clone · GitHub
Using apps like this may be a risky bet (especially if they openly advertise themselves as “clones”) but for someone who likes to build / customize things these may be useful starting points.
I just attended a conference presentation the other day that used AHASlides: https://ahaslides.com/ I haven’t had a chance to check them out and do not know if they are open source, but it was a very interactive way to have a presentation!
