Come Up to the Front of Class: The New Whiteboard

Classroom collaboration and participation is now far easier than ever with the release of Zoom’s new Whiteboard. The upgraded Whiteboard now empowers educators to prepare and create whiteboards ahead of time, as well as save activities for future use in multiple meetings. The whiteboard also allows for students to work on independent pages and to continue viewing or working on a whiteboard after class (great for take home activities). Let’s take a look at how this new tool functions, and how to best leverage its features in class to promote student engagement and learning.

What it is:

The Whiteboard is a canvas for collaboration. Educators can prepare whiteboard pages for breakout activities, or simply get impromptu student thoughts and responses to a question.

Hasn’t Zoom always had a whiteboard? It has! But it wasn’t the most functional for students during class. Students had to know how to navigate to the annotation toolbar, and the whiteboard could not be prepared before class or easily saved/shared after class. The good news is the old whiteboard is still around, so it can still be used if you loved it.

The new whiteboard adds important features such as the ability to be worked on outside of meetings, the opportunity to be created and prepared ahead of time, and the option for students (groups) to view specific pages of a whiteboard on their own.

How to use it:

The new whiteboard now lives on the main toolbar, instead of in the Share window.

It can also be accessed and managed from your Zoom.us profile.

When the whiteboard is chosen, educators can now create a new whiteboard which they can decide to share with students after the meeting, and allow students to edit the board (the default is that students can edit it). Importantly, once a new whiteboard is open students automatically get the annotation toolbar on the left, no more searching or direction. From there students can edit and add in all the same ways educators can.

Multiple pages can be added during or before use, and this allows students a specific place to work in groups. Once open, students and educators can draw, add text, create sticky notes, and generally interact with each other while viewing the same space.

The new whiteboard is highly formattable in terms of what can be added, but still intuitive for novice users.

*Note if multiple pages exist, students can view other pages independently and no longer are forced to view exactly what the educator is seeing.

Engagement Strategies:

Impromptu Collaboration:

Simply pull open a new empty whiteboard and begin working together. Now that the whiteboard is easier to use, these types of activities cause far less friction and are quick options to get students to participate. 

• Ask students to answer a short question in their own words.

• Have students concept map and draw connections to ideas.

• Graph or draw out a content process as it is being reviewed. Or have students do the same.

Group Activities:

Now that pages can be created it is easy enough to leverage the whiteboard for group activities. Pages can be created and titled (often just using the text tool) beforehand and each group can be assigned a specific page to work on in regards to a prompt or activity.

• Each page can be a specific topic/idea and the class can move through the pages independently contributing where they see fit, adding to a collective whole.

• In tandem with the ability to access whiteboards asynchronously this can be utilized to create a “gallery walk” style activity where students move through pages populated by students/groups in advance.

• Unfortunately, students can only view a whiteboard in breakout rooms if it was shared with them prior to class. This makes breakout activities with the new whiteboard possible, but requires a bit more coordination and preparation.

Asynchronous Activities:

Whiteboards can be accessed after class and worked on asynchronously, they can also be created beforehand and shared out as a pre-work activity.

• Have students create an introduction page before the first class on a shared whiteboard and go through their pages in lieu of an introduction activity.

• Leave students with a take home question or set of tasks, review their answers in the next session or as a participation grade.

All the cool new functionalities aside, the new whiteboard has made instantaneous participation and engagement easier to facilitate. Now you can get your digital students to come up to the front of your virtual class and provide answers in the same way as your on ground classroom.