Improving Teacher Controls for Preparing Class and Live Teaching

Over the last two weeks, Whiteboard.Chat listened to teachers and has announced several new features and enhancements to improve teacher’s control during live teaching. Here are a few of them described in detail. As always, do reach out to us if you face any issues or if you have any comments or suggestions at feedback@whiteboard.chat.

1. Pre-assign students to groups

Many teachers have asked us if they can pre-assign groups so students are placed in groups on joining the class itself. This is how you can do that.

a. On launching your instructor board, click on “Avatar” and select “Create Group”

b. To pre-assign students to a group, you provide their IDs which can be the student-IDs assigned to them, or any unique identifier that a student is assigned to by the school or by you as a teacher. You separate IDs of students by comma to enter multiple values at the same time.

c. Once added, you can now put them into different groups and give the group a name.

d. Now when you send the invite link to a student, they will be prompted to enter an ID and a name both.

Note that if you have not pre-assigned students to groups, then none of your students will be asked to provide ID on joining.

But if you have pre-assigned groups, than ALL of your students will be asked to enter the IDs when they join irrespective of if they belong to a pre-assign group or not.

e. Once a student enters both, and if their ID matches with any of the pre-assigned group, they will directly join the group board and will see the name of the group on the top as their board name.

f. A student can also go to their individual board any time, by clicking on the “Avatar” and clicking on the “Go to my board”.

2. Enhanced grid view of students boards in real time

The grid view as originally designed can show up to 9 students at a time, irrespective of the number of students who are part of the class right now. We have made this more flexible for teachers so now they can decide how many students they wish to see at a time.

a. Click on the “Grid View” and click on “Settings” icon to configure how many students you wish to observe in real-time by configuring the rows and columns. Note that the default is 3 by 3.

b. Here is a view when only 2 students per row are selected. As you can see, the boards are now bigger so a teacher can see the work easily.

c. Note that the boards will be populated only when students have joined the class. You can continue to use the lower left corner pagination controls to go to the next grid of students boards.

3. Config option to restrict tools available to students

For the younger students, you may want to restrict the tools that are available to them when they join the class. Now we have two options available to control this. You can configure them by clicking on the “Settings” and selecting as shown below.

a. Simple tools: Refresh, Clear, Download, Move & Resize, Select, Tools, Upload File, Draw, Erase, Text and Lasso

b. Even simpler tools — what we call it as Baby tools: Refresh, Move & Resize, Draw, Text, Erase

4. Upload PDF directly from a website

You now have the ability to directly upload a PDF that is linked from another website. For example, https://www.dadsworksheets.com has a whole lot of ready-made worksheets available for teachers to use. Instead of downloading them to your computer, and then uploading them, now you can use the “Upload linked PDF” and the file will automatically be uploaded to the board.

a. Select Upload lined PDF from “Manage Books” sub-menu as shown below.

b. As an example, let’s say you wish to upload “Spaceship Worksheet 1” from the above site. You go to the site, and copy the URL from the address bar.

c. Now go back to your whiteboard, and enter the link as shown below.

d. Clicking on “Load” will automatically upload the PDF file on your board as if you have uploaded them from your local computer itself

5. Send an invite to an observer to join the class as co-teacher

Sometimes as a teacher you may wish to invite external observers, or your principal to come and witness the class as you teach. You can always ask them to join first as a student, and then you can make them co-teacher, but now you have the ability to send a co-teacher link directly so they become co-teacher on joining the class itself.

a. Click on the “Settings” and select “Show co-teacher invite”.

b. Clicking on it, will give you the invite link that you can send it to your observer over email, or pasting it in a chat window, or over any communication channel.

c. Now when they click on the link and join, they will have the full privileges associated with a co-teacher and they will see that the board they land is the instructor board.

6. Manage your boards using folders and sub-folders

As a teacher you now have the ability to arrange your boards into folders, and sub-folders and move your boards around.

a. Click on “Manage Boards” from the left side panel OR directly from whiteboard.chat landing page.

b. Click on “Add Folder” to create a folder

c. Give it a name.

d. Add a subfolder.

e. Move your existing boards to folders and subfolders sy simply selecting and dragging them under a folder or subfolder. You can do so by selecting a single board or selecting multiple boards at the same time.

f. At any time you can rename a board or a folder by selecting the board and clicking on “Rename”

g. To delete a single board click on “Delete” icon, or to delete a folder select “Delete” from the top panel

h. Before deleting, it will ask for confirmation — for both single board and a folder deletion.

i. You can delete multiple boards by selecting them and clicking on “Delete” and than confirming the deletion.

7. Share your boards with other teachers

We now have the ability for teachers to share their boards with other teachers. Click on “Manage Books” from the left side panel and select “Send a Copy”.

Copy the link and share it over any communication channel with other teachers.

8. Copy or delete pages from your book

To make a copy of your current page, or to delete a page from your existing book, select “Manage Book” from the left side panel.

a. Copy Page: This will copy the current page and add it to the next page. Note that this is not an insertion of a page into an existing multi-page book. It only adds a page if the next page was never used before.

b. Delete Page: To delete your current page from the book.

c. Delete Forever: To delete your entire book completely.