David Weir

Okay, help: what's a good compromise for a whiteboard for one-off use in a lecture? I want to collect student ideas, group them together and talk them through interactively while showing the whiteboard on a screen. Nothing more.

For a long time I would have used Flinga Whiteboard (https://flinga.fi/) but my employer stopped paying for it. They do pay for Miro but it's horrendously complicated to use, and a steep learning curve for a one-off activation exercise in class.

Is there something simple, freely available (maybe - ideally - open source) that is at the Flinga end of complexity rather than Miro?

#education #EdTech #whiteboard #AcademicChatter

Mar 28 at 7:37pmWeb
Show threadMike Prior-JonesMar 28
@davidjamesweir do you have Padlet? I mostly use it for sticky-note tasks but it can do whiteboards too. You could also potentially use Zoom or Teams with audio disabled (but nasty!)
Show threadMike Prior-JonesMar 28
@davidjamesweir looks like figjam might also work, and is free for educational use
Show threadDavid WeirMar 28

@drmikepj Thanks for the tips! They're very helpful.

Padlet is an option, it's a bit clunky and the whiteboard is 'small' (no infinite scrolling) but I think I'll go with this if nothing else. The free tier will be enough for this short course...

(I'd seen Padlet used in language classes in a very different way, no thought of using it like that)

A bit worried that 'free for educational use' is just a way to hook us in and then make it hard to leave (looking at you, Atlassian, and what you did to Bitbucket). But I'll take a look at Figma too.

Show threadMike Prior-JonesMar 28
@davidjamesweir Thanks! Having been burned with Google Jamboard being discontinued, I’m also wary of building a class around a free-but-proprietary product.
Show threadRolle från Degerby 🛼Mar 28
@davidjamesweir cryptpad has a whiteboard. seems quite a simple to me — give it a try!
Show threadDavid WeirMar 28

@Stoori Thanks! I'm not sure if it has fine-grained enough access control for what I have in mind, nor a way to only have one type of object shown.

I'll definitely be taking a closer look at cryptpad though, at least for my own use!

Show threadDaltuxMar 28
I think you could take a look at #Excalidraw, released under MIT/Expat license:

https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw

#FreeSoftware #FreeAsInFreedom #whiteboard
GitHub - excalidraw/excalidraw: Virtual whiteboard for sketching hand-drawn like diagrams

Virtual whiteboard for sketching hand-drawn like diagrams - excalidraw/excalidraw

GitHub
Show threadDavid WeirMar 28

@daltux Thanks for the tip!

I did take a look at Excalidraw before posting this, and I think it has the same issues that cryptpad does - no way to simplify the UX/cut down the number of controls, and access control is too simple (read or edit only).

What I (and I am sure my colleagues) want is something with infinite scrolling, a few shapes, a few colours, the ability to lock objects, and that's about it.

Show threadesko6d ago
@davidjamesweir We've been making do with Presemo that U of Helsinki has. Clunky and ugly, but enough for collecting ideas and facilitating discussion.
Show threadDavid Weir6d ago

@esko Thanks - I also have used Presemo many times over the years, in fact I got into using it before I started using Flinga. But I like being able to solicit unstructured input and then cluster them together into related topics, which a whiteboard-style tool lets you do but Presemo doesn't.

I'm still a bit confused by the mass panic that swept through Finnish higher education institutions; Flinga is still up, it still exists, and meanwhile we're forking out loads of money for an enterprise license for Miro which I find hard to use (and which has the whole university's whiteboards in a single team, which is unwieldy), and Viima, which is 8 euros a seat.

I'd rather they spend money on recreating a Flinga clone or buying the rights to open-source Flinga – if it really is unsupported these days. If all the users in Finnish academia got together, we could easily build a tool with equivalent functionality.