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Visual brainstorming in Microsoft Whiteboard combines teaching presence with social presence in the virtual classroom. It’s a sandpit where you can work on a problem together without right or wrong ideas.
Brainstorm
Whiteboard lets you to draw mindmaps in real time. Students can get a sense of an idea developing and contribute to it, live, or asynchronously with each student adding their ideas at their own pace. This is especially useful on a tablet or mobile device.
Did you know?
Research shows that students learn better when an onscreen instructor draws graphics while lecturing rather than using readymade graphics. People are even more engaged when the lesson prompts them to engage in the material.
Visualise ideas
Whiteboard can be used to visualise ideas. Cognitive presence is a key part of all learning and is about constructing meaning through sustained communication. The visual element of Whiteboard helps sustain this communication, and short attention spans.
- Drawing tools can be useful not only for real objects, but to represent abstract ideas.
- Pen strokes can be automatically smoothed out, creating more legible writing, which is an advantage over a physical whiteboard.
- Sticky notes can give a sense of just how many ideas there are and where they sit in relation to each other, and even in relation to pdfs, Word docs, PowerPoint slides and other rich content.
- A complex idea can be chunked down to a series of stickies to help visual the plan.
- Participants can upload images to personalise or represent an idea.
Big, intimidating group? Try a few break-out whiteboards – one per group – and let students present their ideas back to the whole class for discussion. As a facilitator or teacher you can drop in to each group and see what issues need wider discussion.
Annotate ideas
The Whiteboard desktop app (Windows only) lets you drop in pdfs and other documents straight into the whiteboard. The displayed document looks like a screenshot of the text. While you can’t edit the document, you and the students can scribble, write and draw around it to get an idea of how it fits in to the bigger picture.
Learn about each tool on the Microsoft Whiteboard support site.