Classroom Technologies | News

PresenterWare Brings Assessment Control to iOS

• By David Nagel
• 02/23/11

Turning Technologies' PresenterWare runs on iOS to control TurningPoint and TurningPoint AnyWhere assessments.

Turning Technologies has rolled out a new app that lets users control TurningPoint and TurningPoint AnyWhere via an iPad or other Apple iOS device. The company has also released updates for its TurningPoint and QuestionPoint classroom assessment tools.

The new iOS app, called PresenterWare, works with Turning Technologies' polling software (TurningPoint Anywhere for Mac OS X and Windows and TurningPoint for Windows), providing WiFi-based control over software functions.

TurningPoint is a PowerPoint plugin that integrates Microsoft's widely used presentation software with Turning Technologies' wireless student response systems. The plugin brings real-time assessments to PowerPoint and includes reporting capabilities (with data saved to Word and Excel), support for common learning management systems, and integration with third-party hardware and software.

TurningPoint AnyWhere allows users to create polls and quizzes from within any application--including Web browsers, whiteboard software, office apps, Acrobat Reader software, and others--using a toolbar that floats over running applications.

PresenterWare includes the ability to open and close polling, display live poll results, add questions on the fly, display the response grid, and turn questions into anonymous questions, For TurningPoint specifically, it also includes slide advance and rewind control. For TurningPoint AnyWhere, it includes a countdown timer, the ability to activate questions from a list, and the ability to show or hide the display window.

PresenterWare is available now as a free download via iTunes. Further information can be found here.

In related news, Turning has also released updates to two of its software products: TurningPoint and QuestionPoint.

TurningPoint 4.2.4 gains some performance improvements, support for headers in exports, support for alpha and numeric responses in exports, and support for PresenterWare. It also fixes several bugs and addresses some minor issues with a few third-party apps, including a CSV export problem for Sakai and Moodle and animation reordering in Office 2003. It also fixes issues with participant lists when moving a presentation from one computer to another and an error with Priority Ranking slides.

TurningPoint 4.2.4 updates are available for 64-bit and 32-bit versions running on Microsoft Windows. The updates can be downloaded here.

QuestionPoint 2.1.1, also available now, adds support for Common Core State Standards and corrects an alignment error with Ohio state standards. QuestionPoint is an online question bank that provides more than 10,000 standards-aligned questions for language arts, math, and science. Further details can be found here.