How to Effectively Use an Online Whiteboard For Teaching
-
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the physical ways and methods of teaching and learning, accelerating the digitization of them. Video conferencing has replaced the face-to-face engagement in a physical classroom; screen sharing and presentation slides have become the new whiteboard.
As teachers and students around the world are now slowly embracing the patterns of online teaching and learning, video conferencing tools like Createlys whiteboard software, Zoom and Microsoft Teams alone have become insufficient to accommodate online teaching requirements, especially in terms of maintaining the active involvement of students and collaboration between them and their teachers.
As education is rapidly turning digital, the need for and the availability of tools to facilitate online learning and teaching has surged over the last few years; and online whiteboards are gaining popularity by the day.
In this post, we will talk about online whiteboard for teaching and their use in enhancing online teaching and learning experience. The online whiteboard tool we’ll be referring to is Creately – a visual collaboration tool used by educators to create learning material and collaborate with students online.
Digital whiteboards allow teachers and students to replicate the experience of a physical whiteboard online, with an infinite canvas. They offer shape libraries and premade templates that can be used to create content (i.e. charts, diagrams, posters, visuals, etc.). They also digitize the content created, which makes it easier for anyone to access it online from their own personal device.
Advanced online whiteboard tools like Creately also offer in-app video conferencing and real-time collaboration features where teachers and students can work on the same canvas and track each other’s changes with real-time change previews and mouse tracking.