Tag: whiteboards

Graphics tablets bring whiteboards to life

Reviews the potential of graphics tablets as input devices for web conferencing whiteboards.

wacom 
Last week at Online Educa 2009 I stopped by at the Wacom booth to take a look at their latest range of graphics tablets. I was interested because they’ve started to promote their hardware as a useful aid for anyone running live web conferencing sessions. A graphics tablet is a far superior drawing device to a mouse and much better suited to sketching on an electronic whiteboard. If a facilitator adds a tablet to their kit, they’ll be able to work on-screen much as they do on a conventional whiteboard or flip chart. I reckon that could make a very significant difference in terms of engaging learners and break the reduce our dependence on PowerPoint slides. I’ve got a small Wacom tablet tucked in a drawer, so I’ll be dusting that down before my next live session.
Wacom have prepared a free white paper on the use of graphics tablets in web conferencing, which can be downloaded here.

Brainstorming and the object-oriented whiteboard

Describes how an electronic whiteboard can be used to support brainstorming sessions in an online meeting.

I’ve been giving some thought to how you could undertake an effective brainstorming exercise in an online meeting. I was distracted for a while by a distant memory that the word ‘brainstorming’ had been deemed offensive to epileptics and that we should now use the term ‘thought showers’ instead, but thankfully it seems that this whole idea has been rejected – see TrainingZone. Anyway, a brainstorming session will usually include these steps:

  • defining the problem
  • the rapid generation of ideas (it’s important that no participants are allowed to evaluate any of the ideas generated during this step)
  • sifting out of the most obviously inappropriate ideas
  • evaluation of the top contenders

The electronic whiteboard is the obvious tool to use for this process. If you have an object-orientated whiteboard tool, which allows contributions to be deleted or moved around once they have been pasted onto the whiteboard, then this is ideal: simply summarise the problem at the top of a blank screen and allow participants to type away; when they’re done, you’ll be able to work together to remove the least feasible options and then place the best contenders in order.
Without an object-orientated tool (and Webex might be the market leader but it still doesn’t have an object-oriented whiteboard), you could either divide up the whiteboard so each participant has their own space, or act as scribe for contributions received through audio or the chat facility. You still can’t drag and drop the various contributions around to place them in order, but you can use the annotation tools to cross out the least feasible options and mark the best contenders. A little less elegant but should do the job.