🎓 The everyday lecture
Freeze the projector to flip ahead or cue a video while the room stays on the current slide. TAKE cuts it live the instant you're ready. A pacing clock keeps you honest about the time you have left.
Free, encrypted, zero-build classroom control
Drive the projector from your iPad.
Never touch the classroom PC again.
Open one browser tab on the machine plugged into the projector and walk away. Slides, PDFs, documents, video, YouTube, background music, handwriting, QR codes, timers, polls, attendance and your phone's camera — all of it controlled from a tablet or phone in your hand, from anywhere in the room.
New in Podium 1.3
Attendance
Students check in from a code on the screen that changes every few seconds, against your roster — with entry and exit tickets, a parking lot for questions and a Canvas gradebook export.
Replay any lecture
Your mic, what was on screen, the captions and polls, all in time, with a transcript you tap to jump — and optionally the screen as video.
Search every lecture
Find what you said or showed across the whole term, then play from that exact moment.
Markdown & Word documents
A plain .md, Word or RTF file as one readable page you scroll for the room, with ink that stays on the words.
Pinch to zoom
PDFs and photos fill the screen when zoomed; pinch and drag on your iPad, and portrait pages keep their shape.
A real deck editor
Write slides beside the projector's own preview, with pictures, video slides, Mermaid diagrams, templates and PDF export.
Everything new in 1.3 → Attendance, replay, search and My Files need Podium's own server.
Built for the room you're actually teaching in
🤝 Handing off to a guest
Pair a device with a QR code in seconds. A substitute or guest lecturer gets a controller that already knows the room — no accounts, no install, nothing to configure before class starts.
🗳️ An interactive session
Run a live poll students answer on their own phones, results private until you reveal them to the room. Point a laser, split the screen, switch between a deck and a document camera without missing a beat.
🖥️ Running your own server
Self-host the relay and Podium gains accounts, a shared slide library, attendance, and a history of every lecture you can search and replay with its sound, plus course-level access control — while every page keeps working with no server at all.
Everything the room needs, none of it on the classroom PC
Freeze is a cue
Preview, scrub and stage silently, then TAKE it live — a real video-switcher workflow, not a slideshow clicker.
Marp decks, in Markdown
Write slides in plain Markdown with KaTeX math and presenter notes — no build step, rendered live in the browser.
Now / Next / Notes
A confidence monitor on your device: what the room sees, what's coming, and your notes — never turn around again.
Live pencil ink
Pen, highlighter and a targeted eraser, anchored to the slide itself with an Apple Pencil or stylus.
Laser pointer
Drag your finger across the preview; a laser dot follows it live on the projector and vanishes when you lift.
Split-screen layouts
Single, side-by-side, stacked or a quad grid — each panel keeps its own item, zoom and ink.
Timers & pacing
Countdown clocks for group work, plus a persistent lecture-budget bar that warns you before you run over.
Document camera
Stream your phone's camera to the projector over local WebRTC, or grab a crisp still of student work.
Audience polls
Multiple choice or short answer, answered by a QR code — private to you until you reveal it to the room.
Automated sets
Timed rotations for pre-class announcements, lab rules or sponsor slides that run themselves.
Watermarks
Pin a course number, name or logo to a corner, anchored across every transition and layout.
Music & a real mixer
Pre-class background music that ducks automatically when lecture video plays, with independent channel faders.
Free to start. Yours to own if you want more.
Free
Public MQTT
Zero signup. Point Podium at a public broker and pair a device in under a minute — the fastest way to try it out.
Free
Supabase Realtime
The recommended route for most classrooms: a managed broadcast channel, no database tables, no server to maintain.
Low cost
Self-hosted VPS
Run server/podium-server.js on a small box you already
pay for and gain accounts, a shared library, attendance, audience
polls, and lecture recording, replay and search at real classroom scale.
Every message between a controller and a display is encrypted in the browser under a key derived from your room's passphrase — whichever relay you choose only ever moves ciphertext.