Digital whiteboards are also known as Interactive online whiteboards. They are a blank canvas and depending on the application, you can add images, hyperlinks, draw or annotate them, upload videos, and some allow voice recording. Several allow real-time collaborative co-creation while some are more for individual use with sharing options. There are a plethora of options available today with many proprietary, paid options, a few fully free and some with varying levels. I’ve even found two ‘open educational apps’ FIPPA compliant (data housed in Canada) that are worth a try. See the ‘getting started’ section below for a few options.
Digital Whiteboards provide a space for students to document their learning, often in multimodal ways. The blank canvas can include drawings, text, images, video, and voice recordings allowing students to create a raw presentation to be reviewed by the teacher or a polished edited version to share with others. Most whiteboard style applications allow for sharing with others and some have ‘collaboration’ options. Digital whiteboards might be incorporated into student assessment (‘showme’ what you know or understand about…), as brainstorming spaces or individual/group project planning or presentation spaces.
These applications can provide students with choice in how they want to display their learning!
- Decide on your learning objective and what you want students to achieve. Digital whiteboards can be used to capture various parts of a students learning journey.
- Learn what tools are available on your classroom or district devices because some are free while others have a cost.
- Download the application or visit the web tool and allow students to play and learn some of the basic functions before assigning structured tasks.
Here are just a few ideas of how a Digital Whiteboard could be used:
- Explaining: Explain how they’ve come to a conclusion or answer by providing a visual explanation.
- Presenting: Transform a powerpoint format into a presentation that features their annotations, explanations, and share it as a video that can be refined before being viewed by others.
- Advantage: Students can hear their voice and re-record their narration until it sounds correct to them.
- Collaborating: Work with a partner or in a group and record multiple ideas on the one application. This goes beyond a poster because they can add in videos, overlay them with graphs or additional images, and then record different voices to explain their creation.
- Documenting: Students can create a portfolio that documents different projects or components on each canvas page.
Below are a few examples of interactive whiteboard apps. Click on one to learn more!
- “Personal” digital whiteboards:
- ShowMe – free ipad based with cloud sharing space allows voice recording, image uploading and annotating.
- Explain Everything – mobile based app allows image & video upload, annotations & audio narration.
- Educreations: Interactive Whiteboard App
- Digital Whiteboards for online Co-creation:
- AWW app – web-based with free templates
- Padlet
- JamBoard
- WhiteBoard Chat allows for a teacher to launch student boards.
- Whiteboard.fi is another free whiteboard application I only recently came across. It’s been developed by Kahoot so is worth a look. Teachers can create a ‘classroom’ and provide join links for students.
- Miro is another whiteboard application with a variety of templates including mind maps and flow charts. Pin notes, type and free draw. Free access includes 3 whiteboards with unlimited team members collaborating. One thing I like about Miro is the ‘infinity board’ aspect… the board can be VERY large and just keep growing with a neat little map feature so you can see the whole board at a glance.
- Etherdraw and Draw.io are both Open Source/Open Access Apps that are also FIPPA compliant are available thanks to the wonderful community at OpenETC!