Digital whiteboards

Why use them?

Using digital whiteboard tools such as Lucid (which is intgrated into Canvas),Zoom Whiteboard, Padlet, Miro, or even Google Slides can make your teaching interactive, inclusive, and student-centered. Whether you’re teaching in-person or online, incorporating whiteboarding activities into your lectures can engage students, encourage collaboration, facilitate discussions, and share information effectively. The content created, such as mind maps and digital sticky notes, can be saved for students to use as study aids and for instructors to reference for needs assessments and more.

What can I do with them?

Digital whiteboarding tools are available on a range of platforms, each having slight variations and affordances. Some are available within tools often-used at Georgetown, like Zoom or Lucid in Canvas. Other free apps such as Padlet, Miro, and Canva offer a range of functionality, and can be used to brainstorm, create mind maps, flow charts, and facilitate synchronous and asynchronous discussion. These tools instantly generate live visualizations of anonymous student responses.

Instructors can also use whiteboard tools to:

Create icebreaker activities
Conduct knowledge checks
Organize topic information (themes, sources, etc)
Facilitate group discussions
Host Q&A sessions
Conduct review sessions with students

How faculty use them

Communications

Paul Wang (Design Management & Communications, SCS) uses Miro boards in his communications course, asking students to display initial visual designs and critique designs.

Get started

There are advantages to each digital whiteboard tool, depending on how you want to use it. Below, we describe a few highlight features and provide more comprehensive how-to guides once you decide which tool you want to try.

Lucid

Lucid is now integrated into Canvas and can be integrated into a page or used as an assignment. There are a number of templates that you can share with your students, from brainstorming to mind-mapping to creating timelines to flow charts. Students can collaborate directly in Canvas on a Lucid, or can be assigned one for a grade. For more information and direction on how to do this, visit their documentation hub.

Zoom Whiteboard

During your Zoom session, you can start a Zoom whiteboard for your meetings. Participants in the Zoom meeting can collaborate from their own devices. Contributions can be anonymous or you can ask students to sign or mark their notes as you see fit. To share a whiteboard during a Zoom meeting, you must have a Zoom account.

Padlet

The benefit of Padlet is that while you as the creator have to sign up for a free account, you can share the link to your whiteboard and students can participate without creating an account. This access streamlines in-class usage. Padlet offers various formats so you can mindmap freely, or use the “snap to grid” format to organize contributions. Participants can also click the “reply” icon to interact with the original poster. With the Padlet free plan, you can create only three whiteboards.

Miro

You can create a free basic Miro account that can be integrated with Google apps, Slack, and other applications.

Canva

With the free Canva for Education plan, you can create interactive whiteboards that you can share and collaborate with students in real time. Students do not need to create an account to access/edit your whiteboard. There are many templates for you to choose from, depending on your teaching needs.

Get help

CNDLS staff are available to help you design class activities and assignemnts using digital whiteboarding tools by requesting a consultation.