Remote Learning: Simulating In-Class Experience using a Virtual Whiteboard

The pandemic induced forced adoption of remote learning across the world has created tremendous challenges for both teachers and students. As parents and technologists from Silicon Valley, my colleagues and myself have witnessed teachers’ struggle to teach remotely, and our children’s desire to continue to learn in an in-class environment, but virtually.

The existing technological solutions did help teachers and students up to a certain level, but from what we learnt from teachers, students and parents, more work is needed to simulate a classroom environment in a remote learning set-up.

Let’s quickly look at what usually happens in a classroom. This is a highly generic example.

● A teacher distributes worksheets or other material to students.

● Teacher uses a white or blackboard to teach and students follow along using their worksheets and the instructions.

● Teacher walks around the classroom to look at student’s notebooks to see what they are doing

● Students raise their hands as and when they need the teacher’s attention, and get personalized, individual feedback or assistance

● Many times a teacher splits the class in multiple sub-groups for projects and other collaborative work in a flipped classroom setting

● Teachers may also give out rapid quizzes or show videos or other material followed by a collaborative discussion on the learning

Learning in a classroom is not only instructional, but also highly interactive, and collaborative in a one-to-many, one-on-one and sometimes many-to-one flipped setting. Now let’s look at briefly how remote learning technological solutions have fared in comparison to in-class learning.

Due to the pandemic, overnight teachers were forced to adopt and adapt technological tools primarily designed for business purposes and team collaboration, for teaching. What most of these tools lack is a way for a teacher to have that one-to-many visibility into what their students are learning, and for students to get personalized help when they need it. They also lack the ability to break-out into sub-groups, collaborate, and gain teacher’s help.

Introducing Whiteboard.Chat, A virtual whiteboard designed from ground-up for remote teaching.

Having realized the gap that exists in current technological solutions, we started designing a virtual whiteboard keeping teachers and students needs at the center. We have recently released our completely free to use virtual web-based whiteboard at https://www.whiteboard.chat.

From the beginning our focus has been to simulate in-class experience as much as possible and give both students and teachers the tools they need for effective, highly satisfying learning, remotely. Here’s how we have done it.

This is how a grid view looks from a teacher’s perspective.

● A teacher can upload worksheets as pdf or images clicked using their phone camera, and students can directly work on the sheets in their boards. They can raise their hands which will send a notification to the teacher and the teacher can join the student’s board and provide them individualized feedback/assistance

The above shows how a student raised their hand, and how the notification showed up on the teacher’s board.

● A teacher can create break-out rooms, and assign students to groups, observe their progress and help students collaborate.

Above is how a teacher can create groups. Once created, the students will have two boards to work on — their individual board and the combined, collaborative group board.

Additionally,

● We have also made it super easy to integrate whiteboard.chat with video conferencing of their choice, be it Zoom, Google Meet etc. We also have in-built video conferencing for those who may not have a Zoom subscription.

● Here is a link to an explanatory video that covers many features of whiteboard.chat.

● You can also access our collection of helpful articles and other videos at https://www.whiteboard.chat/help.

We are actively talking to teachers across the world, collecting their valuable feedback and improving their remote learning experience. We are passionate and committed to what we do. Remote learning has been around for some time even before the pandemic hit the world. But the push for remote learning on such a wide scale has had an effect of changing people’s behaviors and it has also shown how beneficial it can be for the larger population. Imagine a teacher in the US or India, able to teach to students located anywhere in the world, who otherwise may not have access to quality education. We believe virtual classrooms can truly democratize quality education and technology has a vital role to play in enabling students and teachers to learn effectively, without missing out on in-class experience.

Follow us at Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and do send your valuable feedback at feedback@whiteboard.chat.