The MapTool consists of a whiteboard for collaborative
drawing of concept maps. When drawing
maps together students may also chat. The drawing
tool facilitates both collaborative creation of conceptual
maps and diagrams and synchronous textual
communication among students participating
in the same study project. It allows drawing lines,
basic shapes, arrows and importing images from a
local computer. All figures and images can be connected
using lines and arrows. The tool also shows a
list of connected users and telepointers showing who
is collaborating in the drawing area. If a user comes
late to the session, she can retrieve the previous
events.

The MapTool is a one application of the synchronous
system called Ants. In order to integrate easily some
synchronous and asynchronous tools on top of the
Ants system there is a common API (Application Programming
Interface). The API is used to facilitate
the communication from the tool to the communication
channel and enables the integration of different
tools with different systems such as Synergeia
and Fle3.

http://ants.dif.um.es/cscl/