While a digital whiteboard is not necessary every time you need a whiteboard, there are
some instances where it is a huge upgrade from a physical whiteboard. You can save a digital
whiteboards to view later. You can invite or share digital whiteboards with students. You can zoom
into a digital whiteboard to bring clarity to something. You can type out text on a whiteboard
and then draw when you need it to. How many times are you, like, writing a sentence on a physical
whiteboard as fast as you possibly can, because you know every second that you are continuing
to write this sentence, you are losing more and more kids? You can set your digital whiteboard up
beforehand. You can screen record your lesson over a digital whiteboard for an asynchronous lesson.
And you never get marker ink on your fingers, or your shirt. I always got it on my shirt.
Howdy folks, I'm Thom Gibson with New EdTech Classroom, where we show you everything you need
to know about teaching with technology. Today, Sam and I will be sharing what we consider the
best digital whiteboards and what context each of them is optimized for. First on the list, Google
Jamboard. Some of the key features of Google Jamboard is that it's got a nice, clean, simple
interface that's pretty easy to get started. You've got a draw tool, a text tool, sticky notes,
images, and shapes. You can add a fixed background on, which is nice because before they added this
feature, you could have a background there, but then if you were sharing with students,
someone would just happen to accidentally move it all around, or maybe not accidentally, but now you
can have one that doesn't move at all. Since it is a Google app, you can push it out to Google
Classroom as a template and use the "Make a copy for each student" feature. And it's got an app
for your tablet, which is nice. The downsides of Jamboard is you can't really tell who is writing
or doing something on the board. And that sucks if you've got a handful of kids all on the same board
and someone just wants to keep drawing circles all over the board. And there isn't much admin control
on the jamboard. Students can either be viewers or editors, but you cannot customize how much they
can edit. You can't say students are not allowed to delete stuff. If they're editors, they have
full access to create and delete as they wish. You cannot add any clickable hyperlinks or embed any
videos. If you try, they just end up coming up as text. And it's a small thing, but when you click
on the top to see all the rest of the boards, it covers up part of the board. I would love if you
could see all of the boards across the top and see the entire current board underneath it. The cost
of Jamboard is free, but if you want your students to be able to create their own, they will have to
have a Google account and then they can create it in Drive. So who is Jamboard best for? Jamboard's
great if you are a Google Apps for School, because it's already in that Google ecosystem. If you're
doing any direct math instruction, it's great for that, particularly if you've got a tablet.
It's great for really quick, simple whole group collaboration. You can do bell ringers, exit
tickets, drag a sticky note with your name on it on how you're feeling that day type of activities.
It's great for small group collaboration and awesome for digital notebooks as well. Next on
the list, Sam, tell us about Limnu. Limnu! It's almost as fun to say the name as it is to draw on
this whiteboard. Not to insert my bias here, but Limnu is my personal favorite digital whiteboard.
If you think Jamboard is easy to use, Limnu is so intuitive, you'll almost forget you're using a
digital whiteboard. What makes Limnu really stand out, and the reason why I like it so much is that
it just feels so incredibly natural and realistic to draw on the whiteboard, and that's especially
true if you're using a stylus. I mean, look at this right now. I'm literally writing with my pen
tablet, exactly the way that I would on a regular whiteboard here. And it's the small details in
Limnu that really make it stand out. Just look at how the marker ink is dispersing unevenly, exactly
the way that it would on an actual whiteboard. I love it. Unlike Jamboard, which uses separate
panels, a Limnu board is essentially an endless whiteboard that you can zoom in and out of. And
what this means is that you could essentially just use a single Limnu board for all of your notes.
You can even create pins on a Limnu board and then share the direct link back to a pin, so that when
you share the board, it takes people exactly to the place on the board where you want them to go.
And of course this is a digital whiteboard, so in addition to a marker and a pen tool, you can also
add text, and sticky notes, and shapes, and lines, and arrows, and stuff like that. And
I'm not over-exaggerating here when I say that using these tools is a genuinely pleasurable
experience. I get a kick out of using these ovals and squares, because it's almost like you're
drawing them out as opposed to just inputting them on the board. And it's kind of a hidden feature,
but you can also upload a PDF, as well as an image, directly to a Limnu board so that
students could annotate directly on top of it. And like every other digital whiteboard, you can also
make this one collaborative by sharing it with others. So although Limnu doesn't have all the
bells and whistles, I do think it has the majority of the tools that people are going to use 99.9%
of the time. All right now for the downsides. Like Jamboard, although in theory, you can make
this board collaborative, in practice, once you get lots of people on a single board,
it's probably not going to work all that well, especially if you're using it with students.
That's because collaborators all have the same level of editing access, so you can delete each
other's work. And there's a slight improvement here on the ability to see who is writing on the
board. So you can see here that when someone else is writing that their name shows up, but that's
only going to be temporary. After they've drawn on the board, the name goes away. So that's not going
to help you figure out who drew that inappropriate thing in class, Thom. In terms of costs, Limnu is
free for some educators and students. I say "some" because you do have to be a K-12 educator, and
based on the description, I also am interpreting this to mean that you have to teach at a Title
I school. Now, if you don't meet that criteria, you can still use Limnu for free. The difference
is that you'll only have access to a board for 14 days. So if you're going to use the free version,
you'd probably want to take a screenshot of your notes so that you don't lose them. And the paid
version is relatively affordable. It's only five bucks a month. And with that, you get unlimited
collaborators and an unlimited amount of boards. All right, Thom, let's hear about Miro. Miro
is our next app. Key features is it's got an open workspace similar to Limnu, where you can zoom in
and out of a pretty big canvas. It's got a wide array of pre-made templates, got a text tool,
sticky notes, shapes, connecting lines, which is pretty cool, and of course,
some writing tools. You can share with others to collaborate on the same board, and typically
they would need their own Miro accounts to be able to edit it, but with their free education
account, students can actually get onto the shared board and edit it without an account.
If things do end up getting deleted, there is a board history, so you can easily restore
previous versions of the board. And Miro also has an app version. Some of the downsides is
that collaborators can delete each other's work, but with revision history, that isn't as big of
an issue. The cost of Miro: typically the free account will limit you to three boards, but there
is an educator plan that you can get unlimited boards with and that plan is free, but you do
have to apply for it and use your school email in the application process. Miro is best for really
mind mapping and brainstorming. It seems to be optimized for that, particularly if you look
through their pre-made templates. So while you can draw on it like a traditional whiteboard,
it's going to be more of a text-based tool. Sam, tell us about our next whiteboard. Let's talk
about Whiteboard.fi. Whiteboard.fi was recently acquired by Kahoot. Gamification? I'm still
waiting. Whiteboard.fi differs significantly from the other whiteboards that we've shown you so far
because with Whiteboard.fi, every student gets an individual whiteboard. So if you've ever used
those physical mini whiteboards in your class where you pass out whiteboards and they show you
the answers to questions as you ask them, think about that. Whiteboard.fi is the digital version.
ike all the other white boards we've shown you, Whiteboard.fi has all the different response tools
for both you and your students to access and they also have other elements that you can bring into a
board like math language and even a musical sheet. And Whiteboard.fi gives you significantly greater
control over your own board as well. So you can do something like set up a graphic organizer here,
and then you can use the Flatten Image tool to actually turn what you just created
into a background. And then once it's on there as a background, you can actually write directly
on top of it. And then something that is very useful about this tool is that you can also push
your background out to student boards. And once the background is on a student's board, students
cannot edit it. So this would obviously be great if you had a graphic organizer and you wanted to
fill it out to model how to do it, and then push that model out to students. On the teacher end,
you can also see all the student whiteboards on a single view screen. And all of these whiteboards
are basically live workspaces. So as students are working, you can see their work coming through
in real time. Click on an individual board, and you can see a closer view, and then you can even
take that student's response and add it back to the teacher whiteboard. With the paid version,
you can even jump onto a student's board and give that student feedback. Now let's talk downsides.
One thing I don't like about Whiteboard.fi is that it gives students the option to toggle the
teacher whiteboard on and off. What this means is you could effectively teach an entire lesson on
your board, but then a student might actually have your whiteboard toggled off, and so they
didn't actually see anything that you did. And the fact that you're actually relying on the student
to open up your board, rather than just being able to push that board directly out to students,
is definitely less than ideal. And a lot of the features I think most teachers are going to find
useful, like setting up classes, creating lessons, being able to jump onto a student's board,
give them feedback, those are all paid features. There's also no app. There's a clear upside to
having lots of different response tools, but that can also be a downside, because the learning curve
is just going to be steeper for both teachers and students. And Whiteboard.fi just really
isn't built for collaboration, but it does still fill a need, so that might be okay. Whiteboard.fi
has different tiers for pricing, and even with the lower priced version, you still
cannot give students feedback on their boards. To get that you'd have to pay $12.99 per month,
which is kind of a lot if you consider that it's not like it can be your end all be all app. It
doesn't have content integrations, at least not yet, nor does it have pre-created lessons. I would
say Whiteboard.fi is probably best for direct instruction, and then having students practice
what you just taught. In that sense, it can be a really powerful formative assessment tool,
especially if you have access to the paid version and you can give students feedback
on their boards. And particularly if you teach younger students or middle school students or high
school students, then you probably want higher level admin access to the board. And Whiteboard.fi
is going to give that to you. Thom, I'm sending this back to you. Our next board is Explain
Everything. Explain Everything was like the O.G. of educational whiteboards. It was the first one
years ago that I had ever heard of. You can zoom in and out of the canvas with Explain Everything,
and if you have the paid version, you can make slides for presentations that you can annotate
over, but you are limited to one slide on the free version. You can collaborate with others on the
whiteboard. The nice thing is that your students would not need to have an account if you wanted to
invite them to collaborate on a board together. And collaborators can actually have their
microphones on while they're collaborating on the board, so that way they can hear each other if
they're not in the same room. Explain Everything is really optimized for recording lessons while
you're annotating on the whiteboard. Nice thing is a link is immediately available as soon as you are
done recording, and in the recording, it doesn't actually record any of the tools on the side of
the screen, which is nice because it makes for a cleaner presentation of your content. Got all the
classic tools, including your drawing tools, your highlighter, your shapes, and your text. I really
like the eraser. It's got a versatile eraser where you can actually erase only your drawings and your
annotations, but not the images, or you can make it an eraser that erases everything, including
images. And there's also a cutout tool, which is super helpful in math if you don't want to
keep rewriting a certain part of the problem, or you run out of space on the bottom and you
want to duplicate it and bring it up to the top. Some of the downsides to Explain Everything: the
video editor of the lesson that you recorded has a bit of a learning curve. I'm pretty comfortable
with video and I can use it, figure these things out really quickly, but even I had to go look up,
like, a tutorial on how exactly to edit the video after I recorded it. And some of the key
features of Explain Everything are only available on the paid version, which brings us to the cost.
The free version, you are limited to three projects, one slide per project, and a maximum
of one minute of video recording, which I don't even really think is usable. The $3 a month plan
does give you unlimited projects. You get slides with that, and you get one gig of recording cloud
storage, which is a lot. There is a class plan if you do want your students to be able to have their
own accounts and make their own recordings, and it has all the unlimited features, and it comes out
to about $1 per student per month. Explain everything is best if you want to annotate
during a presentation, if you want a one-stop shop for screencasting your lessons, and you don't want
to have to use a different screencasting app with the whiteboarding app, and it is really optimized
for the iPad. So if you are an iPad user, Explain Everything is awesome for that. Sam tell us about
Whiteboard.chat. Yes, Whiteboard.chat. If you can remember all the features that we just told
you about all those other digital whiteboards, as well as the downsides, then you're getting
close to being able to describe a fraction of the features that Whiteboard.chat has. Really,
if there's a feature that you're looking for, it's pretty much guaranteed that Whiteboard.chat has
it. Of course you can do all the regular things you can do with the digital whiteboard, so I'm not
even going to mention that, but you can also embed YouTube videos, you can insert hyperlinks, insert
math manipulatives, roll dice, input block coding, create shapes, record audio, input a spinner,
create animations, and play the piano. I'm not joking. Every time I open up Twitter,
I get a notification that Whiteboard.chat has added, like, seven new features. They
even have a list on their website of the top 100 Whiteboard.chat features. Having a top 100 list
implies that there are more than 100 features. It even has features that crossover into other app
territory, like Classkick and Formative, where students can raise digital hands to get support
and where you can actually jump onto a board, give feedback, give stickers, all kinds of stuff. You
can really tell this app was created by teachers. They've even thought of things like the ability to
freeze all boards by making it snow so that you can get students' attention. So if you're
the kind of person who gets excited about the 16 different ways that you can get chicken prepared
on the 65-page menu at Cheesecake Factory, then Whiteboard.chat is definitely your app. I kind of
appreciate that Whiteboard.chat has sort of thumbed their nose at all the other digital
whiteboards. Like, wait, you can't do that and you're Google? We can do all of that, plus 10,000
other things. That being said, there are some downsides. One is that having so many features
means that there is a very high learning curve for both you and your students. It's not like you can
just jump in like you could with Limnu or Jamboard and just use it right away. In fact, it's kind of
the opposite. And I'd also say that I just don't find the interface to be as user-friendly. I mean,
when you have so many different things you can do, it's probably impossible to program
that so that every one is like this kind of really natural, enjoyable experience. But
that being said, sometimes when I try to do something in Whiteboard.chat and I can't, I get
frustrated, and then I'm less likely to go back and try that thing again. Whiteboard.chat used to
offer all of these features for 100% free. It's not quite like that anymore, but to be honest,
I'm actually not quite sure what their pricing structure means. So you can still access all the
features for free, but from what I'm interpreting from this price list is that it seems like it's
really mostly about storage space. So with the free version, you can have unlimited boards, but
then boards have an expiration date and require a manual refresh to extend that date. I'm sure this
complexity is well-intended and solves a lot of problems, but it's kind of in line with the rest
of the way Whiteboard.chat works, where sometimes there's so much going on that it can be a little
bit hard to figure out. So who's this best for? One is if you are the maximalist teacher who does
not take no for an answer. And on a practical level, it's really useful if you want to create
individual whiteboard workspaces, where students would be able to practice different things that
you are teaching in class. And because you can also jump on boards and give feedback,
it's effective for giving feedback too. And I do think Whiteboard.chat is particularly useful for
math teachers, just because there is such a wide range of different math manipulatives that you
can put on the board. And like Whiteboard.fi, if you want to have higher level admin control over
your boards, then you're probably going to like Whiteboard.chat, because students cannot do things
like erase each other's work. Whiteboard.chat does strike me as a program where, if you are willing
to invest the time and energy into figuring out all the ins and outs of how to use it,
you can probably get a lot out of it. Let us know in the comments, which digital whiteboard is
your whiteboard of choice, and why? Did your favorite one make the list? Thank you so much
for watching and we'll see you in the next video and down in the comment section below.