Mastodawn

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

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Mike Prior-Jones Mar 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!)

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Mike Prior-Jones

@davidjamesweir looks like figjam might also work, and is free for educational use

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David Weir Mar 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.

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Mike Prior-Jones Mar 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.