Brent Warner
This is the HigherEdTech podcast Season Three Episode 16: Whiteboarding Anywhere

Tim Van Norman
Welcome to today’s HigherEdTech Podcast. I’m Tim Van Norman, the instructional technologist here at Irvine Valley College.

Brent Warner
And I’m Brent Warner professor of ESL here at IVC. We both enjoy integrating technology into the classroom, which is what this show is all about.

Tim Van Norman
Welcome, we’re glad you’re here with us. So anything new brand,

Brent Warner
uUh, probably. We talked about conferences recently. So as of this recording, I will be finishing class and then going straight to Spring CUE. So on the date, the 17th is the day this comes out early in the morning. And then cue starts in the afternoon, so. So yeah, I’ll be there. And if you are listening to this on your drive to CUE, come find me say hello. Other than that, not a lot. How about you, Tim?

Tim Van Norman
I’m two weeks into my three week class that we talked about in the last one. You’re in also an instructional design class and learning all kinds of stuff that I thought I knew and had no clue. Yeah. Which is good. That’s what the class like that’s supposed to be about, right?

Brent Warner
Yeah, for sure. So there, there’s a lot. I’m kind of dealing with the same thing in my class. It’s like, oh, there’s a lot to learn here and a lot to know. So Exactly. Yeah. Good. Glad. Glad you’re, you’re getting there. And so today, we’re going to be talking about an old tool in multiple forms and ways to approach it. whiteboards, let’s jump over.

Tim Van Norman
So whiteboards, we’re talking about whiteboards anywhere. And as we do this, we are going to actually talk about physical whiteboards. But first, let’s talk a little bit about some digital stuff. I have been, I have been fascinated constantly with whiteboards, I’ve always wanted one. Offices I’ve had I’ve had a complete wall that was whiteboards. I love this concept of being able to just write something down and look at it. And recently, I got in and I started using jam board to try stuff. And I’ve used other things and and was talking to you about it earlier. And we thought maybe we would turn this into a segment on what types of software do you use for whiteboards? And how do you use whiteboards, especially when we’re talking about online? Yeah, is whiteboards can be a couple of different things. We’ve got zoom annotation tool, so you can just simply draw on your screens. Circle something, it can be really simple. But it can also go a lot further. So let’s talk whiteboards. I’m starting with the first one I mentioned. Brent Warner, you’ve talked a little bit about using jam board and stuff like that. How do you use jam board? Yeah.

Brent Warner
So I am not like, jamboard has been pluses and minuses for me. I guess over the years, some people have really embraced it like crazy. And some people are like, I kind of don’t get it, it took me a little while I see the value of it. I kind of I finally figured out at least the way that it works for me is like I think of jam board as a real kind of brain dump. And, you know, just kind of messy, messy collaboration inside of jam board. So for those who haven’t used a jam board is a Google tool kind of similar to Google Slides, but you can, you can, the key features is you know, being able to click a button and bring up a sticky note, essentially, and you can type on that sticky note and then put that anywhere on the board. But you can also draw on it. And you can do a couple of other things with it. And there are a lot of really creative uses that people have found for it. But for me it traditionally with with traditional, I’m already talking about like COVID and online teaching days now as traditional. But, but yeah, getting getting people to collaborate and share kind of single source ideas. So like maybe the teacher comes up with one question, and everybody answers their own answer and they throw it on the board and then they use that as kind of a launching place to have conversations right. So I think Tim, you were expressing a frustration with it, which is like you wanted to have a be a little bit organized were like hey, like in Padlet I want to put my name in here or a title and then kind of do like some light formatting inside of that sticky note. And you can can’t really do that inside of jam board, it’s just kind of it, you know, it’s just kind of like writing with a pen, you write your idea quickly, you stick it up there. And then and then you know, later you can move these ideas around, you can talk about them. But it is pretty loose, and it is pretty open. Now, some teachers do some real powerful things by changing the background. So they’ll, they’ll put in like, you can go upload your own custom background to it. And Tim, I was telling you, I’m actually writing an article about this for the Teasle blog, which will all have some, some jam board backgrounds for ESL students, right. So like things that you can use in a language learning class. But basically, you can create backgrounds put them in there. So for example, you might have a scale, right, on the left, what do you feel on the left hand side? What do you feel on the right hand side? Write your reason and put the sticky note kind of matching where you are? So it might be something like, you know, how do you feel about tax rates in California? Right, and you say, Okay, I, I think that they’re reasonable, or I think that they’re unreasonable. And you could have one on the left side and one on the right side, and then the students could, for example, type in their logic, right for their choice, choice rates for it, and then, and then they can put that either kind of in the center, they can put it off to the unreasonable side or off to the reasonable side. And so you can start collecting class thinking through something like that. And, and the nice thing about it is that everybody can see the same thing, the whole class can log in at the same time and see each other’s work collectively, as a group, as compared to, you know, like, if you’re off on your own assignment, or if you’re just kind of typing in your own ideas. So again, you’re going to need to think of the context for that, what’s the situation where you want everybody to be able to see everybody else’s work all at the same time. But definitely like low stakes assignments, quick jump in, let’s get something done here. Really, really easy for like low prep collection of responses and ideas. Hey, show me that you know how to write this type of sentence or, you know, do this grammatical structure. And maybe you’re not trying to pinpoint one particular student, but if I can see like, so in my class, for example, I might be doing a verb, point, verb, tense thing, right? And so, so I could see like, okay, 80% of my students, 90% of my students are really getting this, I think we can move on, right as compared to, oh, you, you know, Johnny, you’re struggling with this. And I really need to talk to you individually, right now, we can kind of deal with those things later, but trying to get bigger collective sense. So jam board really probably does deserve its own whole feature conversation at some point with people who are a little bit more expert than I am. But I can see really where this is going to work for some people.

Tim Van Norman
Sounds like it would work well for things like timelines where, where you’re giving just a small piece of this, you had also mentioned that you can draw on the on it, circle things. And basically, yes, it’s got sticky notes, but and you can organize them that way. But it’s just different levels. And and that’s really what we’re looking at, in whiteboards in general, is how do you how do you replicate that whiteboard from your classroom, online, and it can be synchronously online, but it might also be where people are looking at it at different times. And they’re trying to come back to it. And if you think about it, that’s impossible on a whiteboard that’s in your classroom, right? Because you’ve got other people moving in and out of your classroom, you can’t just leave a whiteboard up all the time. So as much as as much as we would love to. Yeah.

Brent Warner
So we’ve got a couple of other tools. I think, well, before we get into some zoom conversation, Tim, just briefly mentioned a few other tools that people might like to look at for whiteboard options. One that’s been very popular for a long time, is explained everything, which started off I think, is an iPad app and has kind of grown beyond that, as far as I understand how it’s when it this is one of those tools where I’m always like, I should have spent more time learning, figuring this one out. Because it’s like, you know, it’s there. You know, it’s powerful, but I’ve never totally jumped into it. But the nice thing about Explain Everything is that you can easily record your whiteboard sessions on your iPad, and I think on the computer now too. So if you’re trying to do flip lessons, for example, you can do the work through here and there’s a record button inside of it. So you just tap the button to record and you can actually like make your video for whatever it is that you’re trying to do. on a whiteboard as a default, and then it has a lot of tools built into it. So if you’re doing math type of stuff, you can do, you know, quadratic equations, and you can put in shapes inside of there. But you can also if you’re on an iPad, I’m not sure if it’s on other tablets, but you can write out formulas, because we’ve talked about that many times. Tim is like, there’s still just the problem of writing out formulas on computers is hard.

Tim Van Norman
Knowing your work, and that, that’s where a lot of these whiteboards can come in handy is how do you show your work? How does a student show their work? And it is hard to, to write out an equation with a mouse, or with a keyboard. And so a lot of these come in, I see that explain everything also gives you the ability just to go to their website and enter a code. And now you can join somebody else’s whiteboard that they’ve got. It’s a really nice, that’s a really nice tool. I like when you don’t have to download it to your computer in order to use it.

Brent Warner
Yeah, yeah. So. So explain ever everything is a good choice for a lot of people, I think I haven’t, you know, like I said, I do need to spend a little bit more time looking at it. But just looking briefly, there’s, as always, there’s a free version that has, you know, kind of limited use, but if you want to test it out for free, and then 35 bucks a year is not too bad, since a lot of these tech thing, if it’s just for one teacher, a lot of these tech things cost like kind of standard out at 60 bucks a year. And so 35 is a little nicer price, especially if you really feel like hey, I’m going to start doing flipped recordings. And I’m going to start putting ideas together this way. That could be a choice for a lot of people. The other one Tim, that we were talking about is whiteboard.fi, or I’m not sure if they pronounce it whiteboard dot fi or something. But, but this is the Kahoot. One Have you have you looked at this at all?

Tim Van Norman
Just when you mentioned it, and actually I’m very impressed. So the idea here that I loved his teachers got a whiteboard, they put something on the whiteboard, the students actually get the teachers whiteboard, and then their own each individual. And so you can ask a question, each student responds on their own whiteboard. And then you as the teacher get to see all of them and see who it was. Yeah, I love that’s amazing.

Brent Warner
One of our teachers, I just saw her do a little demonstration. And she was showing in her classroom physically, she does this, right. So she has those little, like little mini whiteboards, and she gives them out to all the students. And they actually, so this is not digital. This is not whiteboard.fi. This is in real life. But it’s kind of serves that same purpose, right? Where it’s like, Hey, you guys just write your ideas on the whiteboard. When I talk about something, you flash it up, hold that hold that little, you know, piece of paper size whiteboard up, and then I can just do a quick check on the class. And then we can jump right back down into the next part of it. Right. So this is the digital equivalent of it. And you can you can scan through the students as they’re putting in their answers or putting in their work and showing their work again, same type of thing, like explain everything, but this one, hey, all of you have your own little whiteboard, you can see what I’m doing. But your responses are going to be separate. And then the teacher can also choose to project that up, right. So if they’re if they’ve got it up on their projector, they can say, hey, I want to show Tim’s work, click on Tim’s name, boom, there’s Tim’s work up there. And we can talk through his his explanation of everything. So this was by a different company. And I think who bought it. I think it was originally by someone else, it was bought out by Kahoot. So if you’re already kind of in the Kahoot world, and you do some of those activities that probably I’m sure they they must integrate somehow as well probably you can put like, quizzes into it or something. I haven’t looked at that deeply. But but certainly if you’re trying to find a way for everyone to do their own work, and then bring it back together collectively. This is a little different than jam board because it’s like everything all at once does together in whiteboard dot phi. Each person works a little bit separately, and then you can choose which whose work you’re wanting to show. Seems like there’s a lot of other cool things inside of there too worth worth playing around. So again, these whiteboard apps and these whiteboard services, they they’re really pushing, pushing what pushing for what teachers need in in terms of these services. So like, like we said, with the math formulas, it’s like it’s always hard, right? It did so. So giving those options and making ways to like to put in formulas or to put in, you know, easy responses into things. I think there’s a lot of cool things that you can do here. And there’s tons and tons of options. If you go on to whiteboard data fi there’s like making graphs and Saving the whiteboards and pushing things out and having students own sessions alone. And you know, lots and lots of freedom of movement here. So this might be another option for people to look at.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. And now as we were looking at this, you had mentioned, let’s hold off on Zoom for a moment. Now we’ll go ahead and get back into zoom, because zoom has whiteboard built in, right. And I found it fascinating what some people have done, they’ve uploaded a document, and then they work on that document in front of students, they, you can draw, you can do all of the different things. And it’s built into zoom. And a lot of people really do like that. There’s also the annotation. So you could, like right now, if we’re in a Zoom meeting, you can circle something on the screen, I was working with an instructor the other day and, and a student and the student couldn’t find a button on the screen. And so the instructor circled it in a big red circle. You know, it’s really neat to be able to do that type of thing. And that’s built into zoom. So this isn’t a package that you need to go out and buy or anything like that, if you’re already using it, you can use this package as well. Yeah, for sure.

Brent Warner
And then also, with, you know, a lot of the teachers got used to using the zoom and the whiteboard, and all those types of things. But, you know, again, you could do other things to make that work. So a lot of teachers are like, Well, I still don’t want to draw on that whiteboard with my mouse, right? So you could go, you know, get like a stylus pen, you could get one of those. I’m drawing a blank on it right now. But you know, like the, the mouse that is a pan on a little Padlet, you know, like, you can get those different different types of things. So you could plug that in as your alternate way of doing things. And so when you switch to protecting the whiteboard, you could just go grab that pen and start writing instead of instead of using your mouse as an option as well.

Tim Van Norman
And remember, you could be using your iPad, and therefore a pen from that or something like that, rather than having to be on a desktop computer.

Brent Warner
Okay, so Tim, I did want to talk to you about this, because this is something that I had asked you before, and I said, Well, you know, like one of the things in zoom does let you share and then you can click on the share my iPad or share my iPhone or something like that. And I have never had success in doing that, like it shows up. And then it kind of disappears or it loses the link, or whatever it is, however they’ve got it set up. It’s not very. And so I ended up giving up. Basically, I’m like, Well, I guess it’s just like, not going to be a thing for me to use this. And I didn’t have the processing power to go in to figure out the best solution to it. But you have the processing to figure out the best solution. So when you shared the way to do this, I was like, oh, yeah, this is not hard. And there’s a really good way to go about using your iPad or, or any DAP any tablet. So how can people use their tablets properly for writing and displaying in in zoom.

Tim Van Norman
So let me give you a little bit advanced scenario on that. I walk into a classroom, I hate standing at the teacher station, right? When I’m going to teach when I’m going to present anything like that I want to move around, I think it’s boring to see a teacher sitting on a stool behind the teacher station hitting right arrow to move through a PowerPoint. So I’m always looking for ways of sharing whatever device I’ve got in my hands with whatever it is that’s projecting on the screen behind me. So one of the things you can use is this brand new tool that you’ve never heard of called Zoom.

Brent Warner
The physical classroom, right? This is important like and

Tim Van Norman
this exactly. So basically, any computer that is connected to the internet can do this. So you have a choice on one of your devices. So for me, I walk in with my laptop, I log into zoom on my laptop, because it’s already set up to automatically log into zoom, I started meeting, I now can go to the teacher station, the main system that’s projecting on the projector behind me and go to zoom and just join a meeting. I don’t have to log in, I can just simply join. When I join that meeting, same meeting that I’ve got up on my laptop. Now I can share my screen on my laptop and that other device is simply a participant in the meeting. Right? So maybe you have to move drag video off or turn off video or something like that, on that teacher station on the main projecting computer. You may choose for instance to Use your laptop for your microphone. Well, if you’re in a classroom, maybe you don’t want to do that. Some of our classrooms, for instance, that IVC are set up to where the there’s a microphone array in the ceiling and their speakers in the ceiling, it’s really high quality system. All we have to do turn off on my laptop, I turn off the audio completely. I don’t want speaker, I don’t want anything. And then I turn that on on the teacher station on that main computer. And that doesn’t matter. The system understands what’s going on. And now I have high quality video, high quality audio, high quality, whatever else I want. And I’m projecting but I don’t have to stand right in front of the teacher station the whole time.

Brent Warner
Yeah, perfect.

Tim Van Norman
And then going back to whiteboards, I can have I can use my cell phone, I can use whatever device I want to use, I can have a student in the class do something and demonstrated share their screen. So students in the class can then participate as well. So if you’ve got something that’s nice and clear on your screen, but maybe projected doesn’t look as good. If students want to they could get into their laptops into their desktops that they’re using. Simply join the meeting. Okay. I’m not talking about streaming online, but actually I am talking about streaming online, they’re just in the room with you. And it can really enhance that educational experience because they actually see it right and are and can interact with you by just simply raising their hand. Well, and you now have a choice to record or not. Yeah, should you want to.

Brent Warner
And that part there too, is going to be important. So let’s say I log in, let’s say I log in to the account with my iPad, right? That’s my primary login, for example, I’ve got my secondary login on the teacher station, and that’s what’s being projected. But then as the iPad one, you can click on that share screen. And then I could go open up, explain everything, or whiteboard dot ePHI, or just the zoom, whatever. And I can use my stylus. And so I’ve got all I’ve got endless options. Now anything that I have on my iPad, I can project on to the either the screen or, or if there’s a whiteboard behind the like under the projector screen, you lift up the screen, you’ve got the white, you’ve got everything projecting onto the whiteboard. And now we’re seeing some whiteboards on whiteboards, right, but but you could have it so that you could have then digital annotations that you’re working through there. But you could also step up to the now projected upon whiteboard, and also annotate over the writing or whatever else is showing up on the projection, which is something I’ve always done in my class, right, like you’ll you’ll bring up like a Word document, for example. And, and then you’ll start kind of showing like ways that you might make adjustments to it quickly. But you can kind of have multiple ways of interacting with that. That kind of digital text, just remember that what you write physically on the whiteboard is not going to show up in the recording in the long run. But again, like that flexibility of movement, that flexibility of interaction, hey, these parts are going to be important, but these parts are not going to be important, right? There’s so much stuff that you can do. And I just, you know, like I said, I kept going to the share screen option trying to get that share screen thing to work with my iPad, and it’s like, nope, nope, nope, it’s not really working very well, or it’s clunky, somehow. You’re like, just login with a second. It’s like, Oh, okay.

Tim Van Norman
And, and the beautiful part is you don’t even have to use a second account, right? Yeah. So you can simply join zoom. And, and the reason I say that is because some people do get bent out of shape. Well, okay, so I need to account No, no, no, no, just relax, just join that meeting, you get a meeting code. If you’re in a meeting in the upper left hand corner, there’s a little shield, you click on that, and it says, you know, here’s the meeting ID. And it’ll tell you if you’ve got a password. It’ll tell you what that password is. So you could just be reminded of it. But that also means you could be in Canvas, and you could put a meeting link in for your students, whatever you want to do. Understand also, you don’t have to have students in the classroom. If you are going to be doing teaching from your classroom completely online and not having students in the classroom, I would suggest doing exactly the same thing. Build that flexibility in for yourself. And it’s simply by opening up another zoom. App. You’re not even opening another session. It’s the same session you’ve been using.

Brent Warner
Yeah. And by the way, just one last tip on this there is a good reason to have a second one open because now with Zoom, when people go into breakout, you can also share to breakout and having to You need to have two accounts really to make that properly work or to two entrances to make that properly work. So the one that’s going to be sharing the whiteboard or sharing whatever content you want to be sharing, and then you do want to have a second account that’s letting you jump into the rooms, because as soon as you jump into a room, if you’re sharing, it stops sharing, right, so you do want to have two different accounts for that as well. So

Tim Van Norman
it also eliminates the whole “can everybody see my screen?”

Brent Warner
Yeah, right. You know, there’s the answer, you can see exactly for sure. All right, Tim, I got a quick Zippy tip. On a Mac, you can hit Command Shift T on Windows, you can hit control shift T. And what this does is when you’ve got Chrome or Safari, or Firefox or edge, I guess, it will open up the last tab that was closed down. So if a tab got closed down, whether on purpose or on accident, and you need to bring that back up, you can simply hit Command, Shift T or Ctrl, Shift T, and it will reopen that last closed down tab. So use this sparingly or well if you want to. So if you’re I’ve seen K 12. Teachers use this when their students are suddenly clicking things when the teacher walks by. I don’t know that we need to do that so much in our settings. Or maybe we maybe we trust our students more. But there’s other reasons to do it, which is maybe you shut something down on accident when you’re moving too quickly or your mouse’s on the wrong tab and you click on that little x. So just a quick way to bring back a closed down tab. Quick and easy Command Shift T or Ctrl Shift T.

Tim Van Norman
Excellent. So our second segment here, we wanted to get into real whiteboards. And Brent, you were talking about this a little bit before I used to do this all the time when I was teaching, I would actually not use a screen behind my projector, I would project directly onto the whiteboard. I had my PowerPoints set up so that they were designed for exactly that. So dark background, white text on or, or, yeah, why by background light text or the other way. And then I would put something up and I would right beside it on purpose. I loved that concept. And so looking forward to two additional things that we can do with that. But this week, I got a new tool. Okay, and I’m looking forward to using this a little bit more. It’s from rocket book, I’ve been using the rocket book app myself for a while, the app itself is free. But it’s some orange sticky corners that you put on a whiteboard. And when you do that, you take the rocket book app, which is free, you can take a picture of it, and just say, email it to me. And it automatically puts whatever you got in there, PDFs it and emails it to you. That’s super convenient. So now you got a free app, imagine all of your students, you written something on the whiteboard, which will not show up in your recording, like we just you just mentioned, right. But the students can simply take their smartphone, go into the app, click a button, and that gets sent to them automatically and shows up in their personal email account or in their school account.

Brent Warner
So you get your students to get get their app, right, they get the app and they set it up connected to their own email address or whatever else it is. And so you’re going to put up these little they’re kind of triangles, right? Like exactly triangles in different part like around a square, some features square have the whiteboard, and the whole whiteboard of the whole whiteboard. And then basically, when they point their camera at it, then the camera inside of the app recognizes Okay, here are those little triangles. That means I’m going to snap everything that’s inside of those those that borderline triangles, and then I’m going to instantly PDF and email it off to everybody. Now, as a teacher, in theory, Tim, you could make your account to be the class blast email account. Correct. So if you’re if you’re saying, Hey, I’m just going to snap everything, and you’re going to get an email of this right away as soon as I do it, right. So if you have a class, a class email address, which most institutions do, not that everyone knows how to access it, but but most institutions do, including us. So we have our class email address, and I could just put that in as my default. And then I could just say, Hey, you guys, it’s already in your email address. Or you know, you don’t have to take pictures of things. It’s just there for you to go and use how you want to next

Tim Van Norman
you could also drag it into Canvas, you can do anything like that. So here’s the other thing if your handwriting is better than mine, which most people’s is,

Brent Warner
yes, the two of us are not good hand writers. Okay, yeah.

Tim Van Norman
It will also try to OCR it. Oh, nice. So it’s really, it’s a neat system to do this. And I just found out today that with the app, there is another option in the app where it can basically record what it is that’s going on the screen. So you could aim your camera at the screen. And while you’re drawing, it would show up, oh, hey, as some sort of a recording, so I’ve got to play with that one glide, just for a free app, I was gonna do this Zippy tip, but it’s a lot bigger than a zippy. For a free app, it’s really a neat way of getting that information from the whiteboard, onto something that you can organize and store wherever you want it. And, and you don’t have to go and get this. The beacons is what it’s called from rocket book. I’ve seen where people are using post it notes, cutting them into triangles and putting those in the corners, or something like that. It just needs to be bright. And just look it up online. There’s a lot of different things. But I mean, I personally recommend rocket book, I love their product. But for free. This is a got a lot of neat possibilities for you.

Brent Warner
So yeah, we’ll put in a link to maybe someone doing that in in the show notes as well. So people can kind of see how it works pretty easily. Okay, absolutely. So Tim in connection to this and putting up you know, on on your own physical whiteboards, I’m going to do a little bit of tooting of my own horn here for just a moment twitches. After several years of pushing and trying to convince we did finally get a few rooms IVC converted into being 360 whiteboard rooms. Where that means that basically 360 degrees all the walls are full Florida ceiling whiteboards. You know, there were, so I learned about this through cue. And you know, I went, I went to a cue bold session several years ago. And I was like, Oh, this is awesome. Let’s start like trying to figure it out. And it took quite a while at IVC. But we did get a handful of rooms that were finally converted to this. And so now the whiteboards go all the way around the room, floor to ceiling. And it has people have loved it like taking really taken well to it. And there was like some anticipation. And there’s tons. There’s lots of resources out there on like 360 rooms that actually kind of started with math. And so one of the things that we did is we showed the math department we said, hey, this is what we’re doing with our rooms. And they’re like, this is what we’ve been trying to get done like, so they came in, and now we’ve got math people coming into some of our rooms and teaching some of their classes in in the rooms during our off times. And they’re sending me pictures of like, Oh, we’re doing entire formulas up and down the wall, we’ve got students like they’re sitting cross legged on the ground and finishing off things at the very bottom. So the, you know, like, there were lots of like, do we really need to pay for it to go down to the ground? Or not? Like, are people really going to use it down there? The answer turns out to be yes, very much. They’re using it there you so this is just kind of basically like you’re converting your whole classroom into a blank canvas, right. And so then it becomes ownership of the students and theirs and their spot to do what they want to do. Now every time they’re gonna come in, and you know, I heard, I got some, you know, minor complaints, it’s like, it feels kind of, you know, like a hospital or something, because it’s all just white and clean. And you know, there’s no no like, pretty decorations going on. But but you know, there’s also research that shows that like, over decorated classrooms are distractions to students, and, you know, like, and so you can kind of have this kind of simple, straightforward, white boarded room, and then full interaction. And there’s so much stuff that students can do, because now they’re physically getting up, they’re moving around, they’re working on the boards, they’re working in groups, there’s all sorts of cool stuff that you can do. Excuse me, you can do together with this. So like you can have your students work in groups. But if you have a dominant student, like you know, the one student who’s like, always, like, I’m going to do the work, then you can actually take the pen out of their hand, put it into another student’s hand and you say, Okay, you got this is the person who’s writing stuff. Everybody else has to talk to them. And they have to work together to figure out whatever it is that they’re doing. So like, so you can really mix it up a lot and get some really cool things going on. Also the teacher now no matter where they’re standing in the room, they can see the work that they’ve done. Students are doing like as compared to like, working in the notebook and going through all these things. So. So if I could really talk about this quite a long, and I’ve got presentations on it, that I’ve done, so I’m going to hold off on that, but, but getting like a much more use and much more advantage out of a whiteboard. And I will say, you know, like people like, oh, maybe we can just put up some of the old whiteboards and put one more in the room. And that’s gonna be good enough. And it’s like, this is a totally different pedagogy and structure, when you actually step into a room that’s fully, fully wrapped. You feel that it’s different. And you feel that there’s something to step into there. And I don’t know if you’ve been in those rooms yet or not. Have you seen them?

Tim Van Norman
I haven’t yet. I actually had just heard that you guys had gotten the approval we you’re right, we have been working for years to try to try to get something like this in place at and definitely have been a big proponent of it. I everything from Hey, fine. Can we can we paint the walls, whiteboard? Or can we you know, what options do we have. And, in fact I’ve on on our next part here, I’ll talk about an option that cost a little bit of money. But it would be something that many people can do if you get your own classroom, you’re not sharing the classroom with somebody else. You can do that yourself, you can create kind of that type of environment, if that’s really what you want to do. But the concept, I love the concept, I love that you can, then you truly have the projection on that wall. And you can write on it and stuff like that you don’t need the other things. And the students watching students just simply walk up to the board to the wall and start writing is amazing. I’ve seen that I’ve seen where they’ve had whiteboards on most walls, and just, hey, here’s the problem. And it’s put on the first the main board and everybody walks and they start working on it on their own boards. And yes, as the instructor, you can see everything that they’re doing,

Brent Warner
Right. That’s a big deal, right? That matters to be able to see that and to be able to watch the students interact with it and all of those parts, so…

Tim Van Norman
And how many times when when you get into higher level learning and stuff like that? Do you want them to do a flowchart? Do you want them to do some sort of organization? And it’s always better to see that, right? Putting that on a piece of paper? Yeah, that’s fine. But the only people who can see it are the four people that are looking at that piece of paper. Now you put that on a whiteboard, and you get the whole class looking at it. And they’re going oh, oh, you know, step three doesn’t make sense. It needs to be over here. And they just draw a line. Yeah, absolutely. I love this concept.

Brent Warner
So just briefly, if people are interested in this, there’s a book by a guy named Peter loves at all. And it’s called Building thinking classrooms in mathematics, but it goes way beyond mathematics. And so if people want to look at it, one of the things that I thought was super interesting from the book is he talked about like, kind of capturing engagement. And so he said, like, well, he had different different styles of like, ways that students might interact with a problem. And one was just straight out of a notebook and said, Okay, you give them a problem, how long does it take them to start writing? And like? And then how long does it take them to? How long will they interact with a problem. And so this was just so interesting, because they talked about like doing it in a notebook, they would spend like three minutes working on a problem. And working on these, these whiteboard surfaces, they would work like seven and a half or eight minutes to fully engaged with the problem and talking it through and, you know, doing all these things. And so you’re really talking about a whole different, like, if you really want your students to pay attention and to spend time thinking about work, like this is another approach that can can really help out so so yeah, it’s, it’s great. Well, I’ll put a couple pictures on the show notes as well if people want to see what this looks like. But Tim, as you were talking about, you know, you could put cheaper versions of these into your office for example, if you’re if you’re bringing students into your office and say, Hey, let’s work some of these things out together. You know, if you like you said, if you happen to have your own private classroom, that’s going to be yours all day long. I don’t have that but some people might say So Tim, what’s what’s this option that you’ve been looking at to

Tim Van Norman
Well, I’ve been looking into the dry erase paper. So it’s, you just literally type that in on Amazon, for instance, and you get this roll of paper that it’s not really paper, it’s more of a vinyl or something but you it sticks to the wall and you put it up and you now have however long you cut it to size etc. But you can create this type of environment For yourself, if nobody else will. And the nice part is you can pull it down and you haven’t ripped the paint off the wall or anything like that. So. So like I said, you kind of want to do it, if you have ownership of a space, rather than just doing it in a room, you don’t want to pull them down and put it back up every time or anything like that. But you can create this type of a 360 whiteboard or this, this ability to just write on the wall, by simply putting up it looks like contact paper. And it’s not. Yes, it would be expensive to do a whole classroom this way. But it’s not that bad. If you just want to do a wall in your office, right? Something like that, you could probably do it for 50 bucks or something, just depending on how big it is that you’re looking for.

Brent Warner
Yeah. One last thing I’ll just share kind of in connection to this, depending on funding and whatever else you have, there is a great product out there a company called wipe book. And I think Tim you and I might have talked about a little bit because you’re saying you work in rocket book. And I use white book, which is like allows you to do, it’s kind of that same type of paper where you can kind of it’s been built into a little booklet, and then you can wipe it off. And then you can use either semi permanent pens or simple dry erase, but they also have much larger flip charts. So like the traditional three M style chip flip charts, but you can wipe the you can wipe those whole boards down. And you can sticky them and do all sorts of cool things. So if you if you’re saying, hey, no one’s gonna fund me for, you know, these expensive 360 rooms, but like I can still get some of the equivalence with, with either the paper that you’re talking about Tim, or if you wanted to get into like a whiteboard flip chart, those might be options for you as well. So, so there’s lots of different ways, again, you know, the whiteboard, kind of as you were talking about at the beginning, Tim, it’s just like, it represents endless possibilities, right. And like, that’s what it should be and just a clean slate. jump right into it. It’s like what’s my idea? And especially I think now there’s so much of education is moving towards, you know, right answer wrong answer. Yeah, you know, like, of course, the right answers matter. But like, show me your thinking, show me how your process for getting through things. And a whiteboard really is a solution to helping teachers see what students solutions are to work.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. Thank you for listening today. In this episode, we talked about whiteboarding anywhere. For more information about this show, please visit our website at the higher ed tech podcast.com. There you will find our podcasts and links to the information we’ve covered.

Brent Warner
As always, we do want your feedback. So please go to the higher ed tech podcast.com and let us know your thoughts. If you have ideas for future shows. There’s a link over there where you can give us your topic ideas. And of course you can go check out the links in the show notes for this episode as well.

Tim Van Norman
Where everyone at IVC that is listening. If you need help with technology questions, please contact IVC tech support at extension 5696 or by emailing IVCtech@ivc.edu. If you have questions about technology in your classroom, please contact me Tim Van Norman AT tvannorman@ivc.edu.

Brent Warner
And if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on Twitter or Instagram at @BrentGWarner.

Tim Van Norman
I’m Tim Van Norman,

Brent Warner
and I’m Brent Warner and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Take care everyone