The Best Free Interactive Whiteboard And Why You Should Use One To Teach.
Smart interactive whiteboards are a blessing for teachers and here is one that is both easy on you and your pocket.
As per a report by Technavio, the global Interactive Whiteboard Market was predicted to reach $1.97 billion in 2020. Interactive Whiteboards have had proven positive effects for both students and teachers. As a former educator, I regret not using this online teaching tool judiciously during the pandemic. Now that I have found one free online interactive whiteboard, I could not stop myself from exploring it, and spreading the word about it, amongst my fellow teaching community.
In this article, I will introduce you to the best free interactive whiteboard that you can use in both your virtual and in-person classes. But before that, let me take you through the amazing advantages of an interactive whiteboard and why you should use one to teach.
Take a look at this picture👇🏻
Now look at this one 👇🏻
Can you see the difference?
In the first picture, the teacher has to ask for a response from each student. She also has to call every student forward. This creates indiscipline and commotion in the classroom.
While it is a good method to engage the learners, it is also difficult for the teacher to manage the classroom. Also, it is really time-consuming in a big class-size. Most of the valuable time is wasted in managing the responses and students. The same time could have been productively used in teaching.
On the other hand, in the second picture both the teacher and student are making the most of the time in the class. The teacher has engaged the students in the learning process. There is a hands-on activity going on in the class. The engineering model has been described by the teacher on an interactive whiteboard in the background. One student is also busy writing a response or reading one from the interactive whiteboard.
Such is the benefit of teaching with an interactive whiteboard in the classroom.
And there are more, read further to find out.
Advantages of an interactive whiteboard
Interactive whiteboards, alternatively known as digital whiteboards or smart whiteboards, have benefits for both students and educators. They improve productivity, collaboration and interaction.
Every lesson that you teach using a digital interactive whiteboard can be stored in the cloud. All the classwork, board work, notes and explanation can be saved and accessed later on. The teacher can share the same with her students in image or pdf format. Some smart interactive whiteboards also allow the teachers to record short explanation videos, like the one that I will introduce to you soon in this article.
Digital whiteboards are portable. They can be easily shifted from one classroom to another. Also, since the board work is stored in the cloud, it can be accessed in any device- laptop, desktop, mobile or the digital smart board itself.
The best free online interactive whiteboard that I want to share with you is even more convenient to use.
Why?
Well, patience is a virtue! And teachers have it in abundance. Just wait some more!
As the name suggests, interactive whiteboards have interactive displays. Thus, they create a collaborative learning environment between the teacher and students. When the learners interact more, they are able to focus better and remember longer. One added advantage of teaching with a digital interactive whiteboard is that all the students can connect to it, respond, add, edit, draw, write and present real-time simultaneously with the teacher and their fellow classmates.
I know you must be excited to know which is the best online interactive whiteboard that comes with all these features, and is also free to use?
Well, your wait is over.
Explain Everything is a free online interactive whiteboard that can make teaching-learning fun for you and your students.
Why is Explain Everything the best free online interactive whiteboard?
Because it literally lets you explain everything!
Imagine everything that you want to say and write can be efficiently organized on the whiteboard. And then saving the board work for later, or forwarding it to the students and parents.
Think of Explain Everything as a digital whiteboard that you can use while teaching online. Even when you are teaching in the front, the students have the whiteboard at their desk, right in front of them. So whatever you teach, your students don’t have to raise their necks or tilt it left-right to have a clear view of the board. You also don’t have to call them in the front. They can write their answers on the whiteboard in real-time.
You can do all this and much more with this easy to use interactive smart whiteboard for free.
How?
Let me take you through its amazing and useful features. I’m sure you will be excited to teach with this amazing interactive whiteboard in your class tomorrow and explain everything!
How to ‘explain everything’ with Explain Everything
Go to their website and SIGN IN as an educator. You will have the basic features available for free, like maximum 3 projects, 1 slide per project, video export of 1 minute, and 500 MB of cloud storage space.
This is enough to have the experience of an interactive whiteboard. And when you teach online, you do not always have to save the project in the cloud. That means you can delete it after sharing it with your students. So, that solves the problem.
Moving on, ensure that your students have signed in too. Once done, you are set to teach with this free digital whiteboard in your classroom.
And there we go!
👩🏻🏫 Edit your teacher profile
Build a professional teacher profile. Update your name, profile picture and bio so that your students can easily identify you.
👩🏻🏫 Start creating a new project
Go to your drive and hit + to begin creating a ‘New Project’. You will teach or plan everything in this project.
You can choose the kind of project you want to start with. You can choose to:
➡ Teach on a ‘Blank Canvas’.
➡ Select a ‘Template’ of your choice.’
➡ Open a file, image, video or ppt already stored in your device/computer.
Interesting, right?
The predesigned templates are pretty vibrant and descriptive. Take a look at some of those-
Choose any one as per your lesson of the day and go ahead. You can either create a project on the digital whiteboard or you can straight away share its link. This way you can simultaneously write on the interactive board and teach, like you do in your classroom.
👩🏻🏫 Add teaching content to your project
You can add different kinds of files and media to your project.
You may add photos, screenshots, videos, audios, files, notes, shapes and figures, data charts etc. Basically you can add any teaching resource that you think will complement your teaching lesson.
👩🏻🏫 Draw anything in your project
Use the ‘Draw’ tool to draw whatever comes to your mind regarding the lesson.
Even the students can join you and draw or write on the whiteboard. They don’t have to come in the front to do that. They just have to open the link of the project on their laptops. Then they can also collaborate and interact with the teacher and their fellow classmates. I will tell you all about that in the upcoming sections. Stay tuned!
👩🏻🏫 Erase anything in your project
This is one of my favourite features of this useful teaching tool.
While teaching, you can erase work from the board. This feature makes Explain Everything stand out as the top free online interactive whiteboard for teachers.
I have used Zoom for my online lessons. Everytime I had to erase something, I had to erase all of the text. There was also no option of erasing parts of an image. Explain Everything lets you erase just whatever you want.
So now you can erase either what you have written or drawn on the whiteboard or you can erase full image or parts of it.
👩🏻🏫 Write anything on your whiteboard
Write, change fonts and font size, align text and format text on the whiteboard. Think of writing on a physical whiteboard, just that it has an interactional and interactive display, giving you multitude of multimedia options to choose from. You are getting to teach conventionally but you are also holding your students attention by engaging their multiple senses.
👩🏻🏫 Explain diagrams and pictures effectively
You can cut out parts of an image, diagram or chart. Then you can explain it in detail by zooming it. So this way, you can explain part of a process. For instance, while teaching parts of a plant in a Science class, you can first show image of a full plant. Then you can cut out parts of it and zoom-in each part to explain the roots, leaves, stem etc. Later on you can go on explaining the process of photosynthesis by zooming-in the leaves.
If that doesn't interest your students, then what will?
👩🏻🏫 Choose how to teach with the whiteboard
Here comes the most interesting feature.
When you click the ‘Invite’ tab, you can copy the whiteboard link to the project. As soon as you share it with your students, they can open the whiteboard on their own screen. Now, they can interact with you and with each other in real-time.
To keep things smooth and safe, you can change the permission settings and the way you want to teach your class by changing the ‘Scenario’.
Amazing, right?
👩🏻🏫 Share your project with your students
You can create a web link of your whiteboard. You can also save the whiteboard work in any format, including video.
Take a look at a short video of how I have explained the shape ‘Cone’ on Explain Everything interactive whiteboard 👇🏻
As you can see in the above video, you can even incorporate this interactive digital board in your Zoom classes, Google Classroom or any other virtual classroom platform. And you can share the link of your project with your class and let them collaborate on the same during in-person classes.
Final Takeaway
Interactive whiteboards are the best solution to teacher troubles. Huge class-size, individual attention, classroom management, student engagement and student focus can all be looked after by using digital interactive whiteboards in the class. The internet is flooded with many interactive whiteboards. You can try them. Or you can save your time and energy by giving Explain Everything interactive whiteboard a try. You will surely not regret it.
Go check it out and start whiteboarding!
👉 Thanks for making my words part of your day! Leave a comment below to share your experience or write me an email at manikapant18@gmail.com if you have any questions.
