BDKanvas is a distributed collaborative canvas that uses HTML5 and ES6, and can be used with any compliant browser (up to now, only Google Chrome, but soon Firefox will also be suitable).

BDKanvas is an idea to substitute digital boards in classrooms when they are not available. A teacher can, for example, use a simple tablet PC with a compliant browser to write, and the contents will be displayed on the teacher’s computer and the projector. Tablets are great, because they are quite cheap devices, but they lack precision when you try to write small texts with a cheap capacitive stylus. But if you use one to write big texts, and those texts are then projected with the computer with a smaller zoom level, the result can be quite convincing…

In order to synchronize the different devices, a server must be used. It can be any computer running Python (but a Linux computer is preferred).

BDKanvas provides:

• A distributed canvas that can be edited simultaneously by different users.
• A brush tool to draw and write
• A line tool to scketch straight lines
• Movement tools to allow a smooth handwriting (or at least try to make it as natural as possible)
• Different concurrent canvases that can be used by different users
• Anonymous connections and user validation
• Possibility to protect existing sessions with passwords that must be known in order to join the session
• The canvas can be saved to the local computer to be loaded later

You can try it at http://projects.bardok.net/bdkanvas-live/.

The project is licensed under GPLv3 and can be found at: https://github.com/malkiah/bdkanvas