Zoom Whiteboard Tips for Teaching and Collaborating in the Classroom

As learning environments evolve, so, too, do the tools educators use in the classroom. From the chalkboard to the dry-erase board to the interactive or virtual whiteboard, instructors are constantly adopting new ways to teach in an effective and visually engaging manner.

Zoom Whiteboard, our new visual collaboration solution built right into the Zoom platform, gives educators a virtual whiteboard to share ideas, visually break down concepts, and allow students to work together to solve problems. Not only that, faculty can brainstorm and collaborate with each other on lesson plans, curriculum development, and more.

Get a quick lesson on how Zoom Whiteboard works, and find some tips and inspiration for incorporating it into your day-to-day below:

One of the cool things about Zoom Whiteboard is that you can use it for synchronous and asynchronous engagement. Pull up a whiteboard in your Zoom session to use with your virtual or hybrid class, or start a whiteboard directly from the Zoom desktop client without launching a meeting.

The whiteboard may be a quintessential educator tool, but Zoom Whiteboard introduces even more possibilities, such as the ability to: 

• Add text, drawings, sticky notes, shapes, images, and comments in different colors and sizes.
• Save and share whiteboards with students and colleagues, and give them permission to view, comment, or edit.
• Lock and unlock a whiteboard to control access. 
• Access whiteboards within or outside of Zoom meetings from your Zoom account. 
• Fit all the information you need — with an infinite canvas, you won’t run out of room.
• Use whiteboards on a variety of devices, like your laptop, tablet, or Zoom Rooms-enabled digital whiteboard.

Whiteboards are like a blank canvas, offering endless opportunities for teaching and learning beyond the traditional classroom space. Find a few ideas below, and let your imagination run wild with even more ways to use whiteboard with your students.

• Hybrid teaching: Illustrate a concept or write notes that can easily be seen by remote and in-person students. Invite in-person participants up to the board to add their ideas, and ask students on the Zoom meeting to participate simultaneously.
• Lesson prep: Start a new whiteboard outside a Zoom meeting to prepare for your lesson ahead of time. Build your lesson around the whiteboard, adding images or text you’d like students to comment on. When it’s time for class, simply pull up your saved whiteboard and get started.
• Study guides: Keep a whiteboard for important notes, processes, equations or information. If you want, give students edit access to contribute their own ideas to make it a collaborative guide. 
• Visual lessons: Design collaborative lessons that incorporate drawing tools and shapes, like having students work together to build a storyboard for a visual narrative, or draw a 3-D structure that they can use to build a prototype in real life.
• Homework assignments: Create a whiteboard in class around the day’s lesson. Students with accounts can create a duplicate of the board and add their own comments or ideas as a homework assignment. They can then share their personal boards with you for grading.

Our whiteboard solution gives you space to get creative and build out your ideas with others as they take shape. Here are a few tips for incorporating whiteboard into your planning and collaboration:

• Brainstorming and ideation: Create your own personal whiteboards to keep track of lesson ideas, topics of discussion, and more. 
• Faculty meetings: Use whiteboards to help take notes, record suggestions, and track action items during faculty meetings. Share meeting notes with everyone after the session and encourage faculty members to leave comments with their feedback.
• Planning sessions: Gather colleagues, either in person or remotely via Zoom, to collaboratively brainstorm curriculum ideas, special projects, and field trips. Use sticky notes to jot down ideas and move them around on the whiteboard to group them by theme or topic. 

For districts offering virtual professional development or training opportunities, Zoom Whiteboard scales for groups large and small. Use whiteboards for: 

• Interactive discussions: Workshop leaders or trainers can create simple visual diagrams ahead of time, which participants can annotate or comment on for an engaging, interactive experience. 
• Workshop resources: Depending on administrator settings, whiteboards can be exported as a PDF or PNG and emailed to attendees as a reference sheet or workshop takeaway.

Digital whiteboards that integrate with Zoom, such as all-in-one Zoom Rooms for Touch devices, enable you to seamlessly open a whiteboard or start a Zoom meeting with one touch.

This makes it even easier for educators to incorporate Zoom Whiteboard into their classroom experience. 

Smartboard devices replace the traditional chalkboard or analog whiteboard with a digital display where you can write, draw, or annotate on shared content using a special touch pen. Students can easily see the board whether they’re in the room or joining remotely. 

Zoom Whiteboard is included with all Zoom accounts! Check out our handy user guide to learn how to create and share your first whiteboard, and start exploring new ways to deliver lessons, plan, brainstorm, and collaborate with students and colleagues.

And be sure to enroll in the Zoom Learning Center’s free Welcome to Zoom Whiteboard course to learn all the different ways Zoom Whiteboard can empower collaboration.