The Power of the Online Whiteboard
Picture this, you’re a student getting ready to go to class in a university lecture hall. You get dressed in the morning, do your routine, and walk to class where your professor has already prepared some notes and an agenda on an impressively sized wipeable canvas. For over 50 years, whiteboards have been used for daily task management, presenting, brainstorming, and collaborating. In the education space specifically, the modern whiteboard has grown to become a staple of any classroom environment. Fast forward to today; in the year 2021, the norm for college students is now waking up 30 minutes before class starts and hopping in a zoom lecture meeting where the connection between professor and student has all but disappeared. So how do we combat this forced separation of mentor and mentee? How do we bring back the collaboration that we were so accustomed to?
A speedy onlooker may suggest that Zoom has been the be-all-end-all solution to the emergency online situation. However, a closer look reveals a plethora of issues that arise from relying on a single platform to handle hundreds of thousands of simultaneous classes. As Suzanne Labarre from Fast Company says, “class via computers itself is not inherently flawed. It’s the remote platforms that are failing teachers and students.” One of the largest issues of using Zoom for lectures is its whiteboard feature. A buggy, incoherent mess can only describe the Zoom meetings where griefers draw all around the screen which is streamed to a classroom full of students. With the rising demand of a reliable collaborative whiteboard software for a variety of subjects, it makes sense that the online whiteboard has slowly been becoming the new standard tool for use in conjunction with a video conferencing platform. So what exactly are the benefits of adopting a web whiteboard software for your classes?
- Bringing back real time collaboration
By using a website such as oneboard.live, teachers and tutors can instantly connect with their students through viewing the same shared screen. With an infinitely sized canvas, users are given the tools to draw out any concepts with the cursor as a marker, or create lessons with text, images, and uploaded presentations. So instead of grudgingly watching a professor lecture on a buggy screen-shared video, students can view their professor’s screens in a real-time, full quality whiteboard stream simply by entering a 5 digit oneboard code to join their teacher’s board. By presenting on a streaming whiteboard, the professor allows students to go back to earlier segments of the lecture at their own pace, instead of interrupting the class’s work flow to go back a slide.
One of the greatest benefits of using oneboard is that students can annotate directly on their professor’s presentation so that their notes can be easily connected to the topics and accessed when reviewing lecture notes. At its most basic level, oneboard makes it extremely easy for peers and professors to collaborate seamlessly with each other. Since everything an editor writes on the board is instantly streamed to any viewer’s screen, this online whiteboard makes it so you can collaborate with anyone as if you two were in the same room.
2. Allowing Creativity
Along with the ability to collaborate effectively with peers and instructors, using an online whiteboard like oneboard allows for creative brainstorming sessions with divided teams and groups of peers. Unlike a traditional virtual lesson, which consists of a presenter sharing a slide deck presentation and taking questions, using an online whiteboard unlocks a more hands-on approach to an online ed class. Students, tutors, teachers, and peers alike can turn a normal lesson into an interactive learning experience by taking advantage of the unlimited canvas and unlimited potential for creative personalization.
3. Which online whiteboard should I use?
With the rise of Zoom university, it makes sense that many software companies have been developing online whiteboard websites for use in virtual presentations. So what separates a good online whiteboard and a bad one?
A good whiteboard needs to be easy to join and accessible from any device (including phone, computer, and tablet). This way, a student can instantly enter an online lesson without needing to know how to use a confusing platform. This is the area where many online whiteboard websites are lacking, as they often contain too many tools and features that simply are not vital for conducting an online class — an environment that demands responsiveness and software agility. This leads to poor performance and slow, laggy lessons.
Luckily, the website we recommend avoids these common issues by minimizing the amount of time it takes to learn how to use the platform and focuses the valued attention of the student on collaborating, sharing, and connecting with their peers and teachers on a real-time interaction. Oneboard is the ultimate whiteboarding platform for uploading images, presentations, and all types of media. Best used on a tablet with a stylus, teachers can draw and teach with their students viewing each and every edit in real time from their screens at home. With a dedicated drive and endless sharing options, oneboard lays the groundwork for how education should be handled in an online classroom environment. Additionally, it is the only current whiteboard on the market that is completely free to use for unlimited creations and unlimited sharing.
