/PeerSquared

PeerSquared - online teaching

Primary LanguageJavaScriptMIT LicenseMIT

PeerSquared

Note: this is an older version, I'm not providing support for this currently

PeerSquared is a free and easy to use tool for one-on-one online teaching. The teacher has a whiteboard to draw, write text, and put pictures on to explain a subject to a student. It also includes both video and text chat, as well as an option for direct file exchange.

The updated version is modular: it is split into independent objects which are tied together by event handlers. See the API documentation.

New in this version are also:

  • redo actions
  • paste screenshots onto the whiteboard
  • synchronize the whiteboard

HTML5 & PeerConnection (webRTC)

PeerSquared makes use of the fresh and still experimental PeerConnection technology, which is part of the HTML5 spec. It requires so-called reliable datachannels, which are currently only built into Firefox 22 and higher. Chrome does support the PeerConnection, but currently no reliable datachannels. For more info see the webRTC website

Demonstration

For a demonstration see:

Teacher

Student

License

PeerSquared currently uses a MIT license, so you are free to copy, use and modify it.

Installing it

You will need a websocket server to use PeerSquared, since the PeerConnection needs to exchange some information through a server. See the script/Pusher_Socket.js for a demo version of how to connect to a websocket server.

As you can see in the index.html file you will need to initialize the program by calling 'PR2.init()' which takes an object as argument. This object contains a "credentials" object , and optionally a "config" object that overwrites the initial configuration. The credentials must contain a user name, a room name, and a level (either student or teacher), so like this:

"credentials" : {"name" : name, "level", level, "room" : room}