Shared whiteboard

To allow for visibility of work performed and to enable collaborations either between small teams of individuals or amongst the whole class during a video tutorial experience. 

Suitable for

Pairing with an online tutorial/workshop session.

When to introduce

During video conferencing sessions.

Time required

Technologies

• Microsoft 360 (OneDrive)/PowerPoint
• Google Slides
• Miro
• Zoom or Teams conference

Guiding principles

#3 Built for active learning

By using Microsoft PowerPoint as part of Office 365 you can create a shared online ‘whiteboard’ space where a class of individuals can add their thoughts and collaborate in real time during a video conference session. By adding questions and prompts to the board for students to respond to; you can structure a guided experience that compliments the video conference discussion.

By using this common tool with simple editing features, the barrier for entry is minimised and learners can jump into playing with the content (rather than grappling with the tool). Using something like PowerPoint will hopefully also make it quicker for you to put together the sheets with the necessary prompts.

There are a range of different ways that you could use this idea. For each of the following the setup is as simple as creating the PowerPoint presentation and then sharing an edit link with your students. You can contain the necessary signposting in the presentation itself so that students know where they should contribute.

Providing a facilitator view for an individual activity

One option is to set up an individual slide/whiteboard for each student, to give them each a space to work that is easily visible to you and their peers. This provides an experience that is analogous to being able to walk around a physical classroom to see what students are working on. You may give students a task to perform and then while they are completing that task you can view the work they are doing to identify any interesting examples or collective misconceptions to discuss afterwards. This also provides an easy way for students to present their work back to the class in a follow-up discussion – students just need to navigate to the appropriate slide. This would also make ‘pair and share’ interactions easy to facilitate.

As a shared space for in-class group work

By pairing the use of a selection of whiteboard spaces with the use of breakout groups (either random or student-defined) you can create collaborative group activities where learners work together on a single board. Once again the visibility allows you to view the work in progress and for students to present back their work to the wider group in a followup discussion.

As a collective class activity

Another way to make use of this setup is to make a board (or series of boards) where you gather the input from the whole cohort at once in response to a selection of questions/prompts. For example, asking the whole group for their opinions about a topic which can then be unpacked and discussed. You can also provide diagrams or other visuals.

For example, in a medical context you could ask students to place markers to identify different parts of anatomy on an image. Framing activities in this way allows you to draw opinions from a number of students in a short time to stimulate discussion. Additionally, by identifying any key misconceptions you can respond to them then and there. Using the example above, if there were a number of students who incorrectly identified a region of the anatomy you could respond to this misconception in the discussion.

Ultimately a digital whiteboard can be used in this way to set up basic versions of polling-like features that are present in a more structured fashion within conferencing tools like Zoom, but setting these up within the context of a simple slide deck can make things easier to build and makes the flow of the experience more straightforward (rather than switching between different tools).

• While you can provide students with a blank page to work on as they see fit, prompts are always helpful in getting some momentum going and helping students grapple with the task.
• Consider how you can provide formatted board elements that will allow students to get into the work at hand rather than having to set up the board. For example, can you create and duplicate a page of text box ’sticky notes’ that they can fill in, rather than students needing to create and arrange text boxes for themselves as part of the activity?
• When writing questions think about open ended prompts that will invite engagement. What are the sorts of questions that learners want to respond to? Where can they offer something from their personal understanding and experience?
• When trialling this type of experience don’t be afraid to take an iterative approach – just having a go, seeing what works and trying something different the next time. This is the best way to figure out what works best for your students, your teaching practice and your subject matter.

Use the following link to create a copy of a shared whiteboard template: Shared Whiteboard template on Google Slides.

MS PowerPoint (Office 360), Miro and other sharable presentation slides tools can be adapted as interactive shared whiteboards with close to zero cost. In these shareable areas, teachers and students collaborate in real-time, which enables them the opportunity of fostering brainstorming ideas and creating learning artefacts. 

Working collaboratively in an online environment can foster collective intelligence that emerges from interactions between students working in a group trying to solve a problem or produce an artefact (Malone et. al, 2009). 

There are many approaches that academics can adopt to maximise the passivity of the web conferencing tools. Jackson (2020) suggests five group activities with the virtual whiteboard that can be used to influence student motivation levels. This includes brainstorming, drawing activities, gamification, solving problems, and annotating using shared documents.

References

Jackson, E. (2020). Group Online Whiteboard Use for Student Engagement and Active Learning [Blog]. Retrieved from https://www.d2l.com/blog/group-online-whiteboard/

Malone, T. W., Laubacher, R., & Dellarocas, C. (2009). Harnessing crowds: Mapping the genome of collective intelligence.

Designer: Marty van de Weyer LX.lab, IML
Reviewers: Dimity Wehr, IML and Mais Fatayer, LX.lab, IML