In this digital era, where the use of technology is being incorporated into education more than ever, there has been a lot of tools made for teachers to use, especially when it comes to online learning.
One of such tools is the online whiteboard – something that is really really useful and convenient for teachers to use in their online lessons. Through this tool, teachers can bridge the gap between online learning and a physical classroom setting, thus maintaining the quality of the education no matter how it is being conducted.
Online teaching has become even more relevant with the recent pandemic that has affected almost all the countries worldwide, with many of them shifting towards teaching online in order to comply with the safe-distancing or lockdown measures put in place.
We believe that the online whiteboard is a really useful tool to try out especially during this period of time.
If you are a tutor looking to incorporate the online whiteboard in your lessons, and are curious to learn more, you have come to the right place!
We have compiled the functions and benefits of the online whiteboard over here for you! Keep reading on to find out more.
6 Benefits and Functions of Online Whiteboard
1. Provides interactive learning
An interactive whiteboard enables the students to learn by interacting with the learning material during online tutoring. It will easier for the students to learn or understand a particular subject through writing, drawing or even touching on the board.
Furthermore, majority of the students are reluctant to listen or pay attention in class. The tutors can use the features provided to create some games to be played by the students to keep their attention and to increase the engagement between tutors and students.
These can be something as simple as brainstorming, which is really helpful to improve your student’s creativity and critical thinking skills, or even using the features provided in the online whiteboard to create quizzes, etc.
2. Allows persistent and elaborate changes of Document
Another function provided by Digital Whiteboard is that it allows tutors to make constant and elaborate on the changes to a file and hence improve communication between students and teachers.
Teachers can annotate the documents through the online whiteboard in real time, and this is an effective way of helping students understand notes provided, and also let them clear any doubts they have regarding the topic on the spot.
3. Allows for file and screen-sharing
The Digital Whiteboard also allows tutors or presenters to either share a screen during online tutoring or share files at the class. That means despite where the students or attendees are located, they will be served with exactly the same information being shared. It also ensures everyone focuses on the same point and that all the students or attendees will move forward together.
As mentioned earlier, the screen-sharing feature is very helpful when it comes to annotating notes together with the students, helping them understand the topic better and allows students to take note of extra information not in the notes.
Another good thing about this feature is that teachers do not have to worry about printing the notes, and they also don’t have to worry about being short of enough copies, printing errors, etc. Furthermore, this is an eco-friendly way of providing notes for their students, as no papers are used.
4. Flexible Scheduling
As a tutor, if your schedule is full, and you do not have time to provide a tutorial until very late of the day, or very early in the morning, online tutoring will be your best option as you can arrange the tutorial based on your flexibility by provides an online tutorial for a student from different time zone.
In addition, if you’re having numerous tutorials on a day, you, or the students do not need to rush from one location to another to meet with each other which can save your time.
The flexibility in scheduling can allow you as a tutor to be able to fit in more lessons and you can even use the extra time to tutor students who might need a little more help in some topics.
As a tutor, having the freedom to schedule your lessons makes it more convenient to you, is an important feature the online whiteboard allows you to have.
5. Save Time and Transport Cost
This is a rather underrated benefit of using the online whiteboard – saving the time taken by travelling and saving on the transport costs. By having online tutoring, tutors will be able to reduce the cost of traveling from location to location. Furthermore, tutors will be also avoided from wasting the time of traveling especially during rushing hours.
By choosing online tutoring tutors can have plenty of extra time, and a lot can be done in the time that is saved. For example, tutors will be left with more time to prepare the teaching materials for the students, or be able to provide extra consultation sessions for the students who really need help in some particular topics.
Any tutor would love to have that extra time on their hands, and this is something possible with the online whiteboard.
6. Other useful features included with the online whiteboard
Some of the online whiteboard applications come with an array of features curated for educators to use.
One such application is Heyhi, our app that has video-conferencing, interactive whiteboard, and screensharing. Apart from this, it has features such as taking attendance of students, which is quite important for teachers to ensure the participation of students, and it also enables them to keep track of it. It also has a question bank teachers can set for the students, and these can let tutors track the progress of their students. Lastly, with file-sharing, tutors can upload notes, reading materials and so on for students to refer to, even during lessons.
As you can see, with the additional features in these applications, it can further help aid in conducting lessons online, making it much easier for tutors and the students to use the application!
Conclusion
As you can see, the benefits of using an online whiteboard to conduct your lessons online can really tell how useful and how handy of a tool it is.
We definitely understand the hesitance of some educators behind switching to online to hold their lessons on, however with the uncertainty in the world with new developments being made every day, sometimes we may not have much of a choice.
However, with the online whiteboard and its benefits, we hope to ease that apprehension and help you understand that this can be a way to preserve the quality of teaching in real life. After all, this might be the closest thing you can get in an online application, to a traditional classroom setting with a whiteboard.
If you are willing to give it a try, Heyhi would definitely be a good place to get started! With the array of features as mentioned above, this would definitely make for a useful companion in your online teaching. You can refer to this youtube tutorial to see how it works:
If you would like to see it for yourself, you can request for a demo or sign up for an account here.
Heyhi is available to use on your PC, or can be downloaded as an app on your devices through Google Play Store and Apple App Store.