Brent Warner 0:01
This is the HigherEdTech podcast season five episode 17. Goodbye JamBoard, Hello Figjam

Tim Van Norman 0:20
Welcome to today’s HigherEdTech Podcast. I’m Tim Van Norman, the Instructional Technologist at Irvine Valley College.

Brent Warner 0:25
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 0:34
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us. So, back from spring break, second, eight weeks, and life is continuing.

Brent Warner 0:45
I hope I hope everybody had a good time, I was able to relax a little bit. And actually, we have colleagues and other schools that haven’t started their spring break yet. So prep for less Yes, but But overall, wherever you are, today, we’re talking about well, I guess we’re talking a little bit about a dying technology and its replacement. So let’s, let’s jump over to it. Okay, so Tim, two years ago, I think it was actually March of 2022, we did a a full episode on whiteboarding options, so like digital whiteboards, physical whiteboards, all the different things. And one of the things that we talked about that was popular with a lot of teachers that kind of blew up during the, during COVID was the jam board, which was a whiteboard system created by Google, that allowed a lot of different people to get on and kind of interact with one kind of never ending whiteboard right. Now, both you and I talked about that a little bit, and we have some colleagues that really got into it, there are definitely a lot of teachers who really loved the jam board. I always found it a little, it was a little clunky for me or a little, it was always a little awkward and never quite did what I was looking for. And then I was like learning all these, like, long form hacks to make things work. You know, it’s like, okay, in order to do this, you can’t really do this, you have to do this, and this and this instead. And it’s like, didn’t totally know if it was worth it. And then recently, Google’s like, it’s, it’s, we’re putting it in the Google graveyard, basically. So first things first, Tim, I want to hear your impressions of Jim Gordon in just a second. But just so people know, we get started with this. We’re talking about this today, partly because Google has announced that it’s going to the Google graveyard, which means it’s not going to be available. You if you use jam board, you still have access until September 30 2024. And then on October 1 2024, it’s gone. So it’s a little bit early, maybe. But if you have jam boards, you can import them into fig jam, you can do all these different things. So you need to start planning ahead a little bit if that’s, you know, kind of where your head is at. Or if you’re saying hey, if not, we’re going to be talking about some of the cool features of fig jam, to break things down. But, Tim, let’s talk a little bit about jam board first. And what do you think because I know you got frustrated too. Oh,

Tim Van Norman 3:26
I actually tried to avoid it. Once. Once I played with it a little bit. There were some key things that I really didn’t like. So one of them was you could not hit enter in the middle of a post it note. So that meant that you couldn’t, you couldn’t organize anything. There’s no such thing as a paragraph, no formatting, anything like that. That was a huge one. Also, you couldn’t make some things bold and something’s not in there. And so you couldn’t organ basically organize. I really like to organize my notes. Even when I’m writing notes. I’ll write something across the top of a post it note draw a line and then I’ll put the information under it. I want to separate it. That’s how I myself think about it. Jam board had nothing like that. So it drove me nuts so fast that I was in a presentation a little bit ago, and they wanted us to interact with a jam board and everybody looked at my face and they’re like, oh, Tim doesn’t like this one. Exactly. And and I had just days before heard that that Google was getting rid of and I said well at least it’s going away so yes, I went would you brought this one fig jam to me. My first questions were does it do these things and sure enough, we’re gonna get into it and I I like it so much better. We’re all ready. Yeah. So by the way, also for educators, the price is the same as jam board was free,

Brent Warner 5:07
Free, our favorite four letter word.

Tim Van Norman 5:09
We always love those, that word. And so yes, just we’re letting you know at the top that this is free. Some stuff that we talked about does cost money. But in this case, it does if you aren’t using it as an educator, but if you are, so far that we’ve been able to see it is free. And

Brent Warner 5:32
Actually, it seems like from what I understand a little bit of research on the back end to it seems like they’re actually quite committed to this thing, because they say they even say like, on the website free forever, always for teachers and for students. And so. So there’s a kind of a lot to that. I mean, I mean, that’s a great approach and really useful. So if you want to kind of get into it, it’s not a concern, but you do you have to verify that you’re a teacher, or work with your institution to kind of sort that out. But it doesn’t take very long.

Tim Van Norman 6:01
Yep. Yep. And also, in case you’re concerned, it can export and import. Now, I don’t know if it will export and import from jam board. But it is kind of a neat feature to allow for exporting and importing of these documents as you great.

Brent Warner 6:17
Yeah, yeah. So really quickly, we’re kind of a couple of minutes in here, we haven’t really quite explained it just in case there are people like I’d never use either of these, I don’t know what we’re talking about. Should probably clarify. So basically, what fig jam is, is a it’s a digital whiteboard that allows for all sorts of multimedia manipulation on it, right. So you can kind of imagine that you’re standing in front of a giant real whiteboard, and you wanted to be able to with it, let’s say it has a magnet on it, right like a magnet whiteboard. And so you’re gonna say, Hey, I’m going to put my iPhone up. So students can watch videos over in this section, and then I’m going to put a box around that, and then I’m going to have them be able to write their comments underneath it. And then we’re going to have a, you know, some sort of rulers so they can draw straight lines from one idea to the next. And then we’re going to have sticky notes so they can put their ideas up here. And then we’re going to have a microphone on the board. So students can talk to it all these different things, right. So you kind of imagine that they can all move on this giant whiteboard all at the same time, all in their own sections if they want to. And so this is it can get a little bit messy. And this is also one of the reasons I didn’t like jam board was because it got messy, but there weren’t really any controls or ways to kind of limit that or, you know, wrangle the the cat so to speak, you know what I mean? And so, so fig jam does have that same real open freedom. But it also has ways to kind of bring things in. So if a student accidentally deletes it, it’s really easy to fix something. And a few other features like that. So so this is kind of what we’re talking about when we’re talking about fig jam. But can we also support and we you and I both like another platform that is somewhat similar, which is tablet?

Tim Van Norman 8:16
Absolutely. So what I like about Padlet is so I know I’m going to say organization an awful lot. I like it. I like that Padlet allows you to be very organized, if you want to be and not that this doesn’t. But Padlet Padlet seems to be a little bit more organized by default. Yeah. And while you can drop things in random locations, it’s not it’s kind of a grid random. Yeah. It’s not true random, random. And, and it comes with maps, and it comes with other things that you can use, which is great. This one comes with templates. And so you can build out flowcharts you could build out the different components and combine them all into one. Fig board. Yeah, okay. And that’s something Padlet doesn’t really do that you’d have multiple Padlets for different things. This would allow you to have literally one thing. Big board I think is what they’re calling the last big jam. fig jam board. That’s it for your class. Tried to get the terminology right. And you could literally have week one beside it week two, week three, and you could have things hidden. And so when the students come in, they can then see what that is. And oh, okay, now the next week is available in Oh, now the next week is available. And so you could actually build this out over time and and develop it and have different templates for different times of your class because the reality is, while your class has consistency. Some days, you want to do it this way. And some days you want to do it that

Brent Warner 10:04
way, right? Yeah, that’s a great point. So it’s like, hey, with, with Padlet. And again, I love Padlet. There’s so much great stuff with Padlet. So I’m not, you know, it’s just kind of you want to think about your use case. But with Padlet, you’re kind of like, hey, it’s kind of for this one activity. And then you got to make a new one for the next activity where you could with fig jam, you could really kind of say, like you said, you could do the whole semester, but you could, let’s just kind of keep it a little simpler and say, hey, I want to run through three or four activities in the day’s class. And we’re just going to move from one section to the next to the next, and then all the students can kind of keep interacting with the same document without going from place to place. Now, there might be reasons why you would say, hey, we just want to be able to have the one thing and we can reach back to that easily and access it. There might be reasons where you say, hey, it’s really good to have a flow and let us move through from one side to the other. So your pedagogy will just, you know, determine what your needs are there. It’s not to say one’s better or worse, but it’s just to say the setups are slightly different. Also, with fig jam, I think there’s a little bit more of that looseness, like we said, so you could kind of keep extending it in weird ways. Whereas with Padlet, it’s like, you’re pretty much just going down, right? You’re like, hey, starting at the top, and we’re working our way down. And with fig jam, it’s kind of like, Oh, hold on a second, I need to move to the side. And like physically, I actually mean like, hey, we if I want to do some mind mapping activities, I can move, I don’t just have to see all my students ideas down from the side, I could say, Hey, you guys are going to take this side of the argument. And you guys are going to move to the left of the key point and put your sticky notes to the left of the center. And you guys are going to put your sticky notes to the right of the center. And we’re going to move in different physical directions, which kind of is allows for interesting learning ideas of like how space works, and how movement works, and those kinds of ideas. And so it’s just worth kind of recognizing, we’re playing with different setups, even though the multimedia aspect is partly the same, but just all worth looking at. So Tim, I think we’re gonna jump into some of the specific features that are really useful in here. And I’m going to start with one that I think is pretty cool. So I’m going to kind of imagine we’re talking about all of our students online. So if they’re in an online class, and we’re all we’re all logged into the same jam board, we can all look at the same thing all of us can be interacting with it at the same time. One feature that’s cool, if you hold down the E button on wherever you are, it’ll bring up a little, a little stamp box, I guess it’s like a little circle ring. And then you can either choose to do an E emote or to stamp and so if a student or if you as a teacher are focusing in on one area, you can kind of get your emojis on there, and you can hold it down just like you do on you know, tick tock or Instagram or something like that. It’s like letting the hearts flow and fire, the fire emojis kind of started flickering in and out, right. And so it’s like just showing, hey, I liked this part, or I don’t like this part. And so you could be asking your students to kind of give you a heat map at that moment of like, Okay, which of these answers do you like the best. So let’s say you had a bunch of students and say everybody leaves a sticky note to receive, leave your response, and then go highlight the one that you think is the best response or go go, you know, put the little emojis on it. And they can do that. And it’ll just show up for a second, you can kind of get a sense of it. You can also do the other way around, where you can say, hey, leave a stamp. And then that’ll leave a permanent little stamp on the area too. So you can kind of have different ways of interacting. So I really liked that fact that you can just kind of see all the interactions and have students kind of leave their leave their tracks of what they’re thinking about as they’re going through things.

Tim Van Norman 13:50
Well, and the stamps. I love that because they can literally if they don’t understand something, they can put a question mark, right, where they don’t understand. And this is the thing I don’t understand rather than, you know, you see this all the time in a meeting chat, somebody says says something like, Oh, I agree. And by the time you see it, you don’t know what they agreed to. Was it two seconds ago or was it five minutes ago? Yeah. Which are and so this this could go directly to where they have the question where they have the agreement where they Thumbs Up where they whatever that is that very specific time and understand. You’re talking synchronous, the the with the most emotes, as they’re calling them. That would be synchronous. Absolutely. But with the, the other reactions that’s asynchronous. Yeah, you could do that later and come back at the stamps and see where that comes in. And go oh, okay, so this is the area where a lot of people thought they had a question. Maybe I want to expand on this. And so rather than you needing to take take came out of the class to look and see where people had questions, you can do that later. Very cool. Oh, absolutely. I love that. So while you’re talking about live, so this is one you and I were playing with spotlight me, that is pretty amazing. So you can hit a button and everybody comes and watches what you do, what you’re clicking on what you are interacting with, and stuff like that. That was really neat, to be able to see that. You’re zoomed in and boom, it zoomed in front of me, you’re zoomed out, and it zoomed out. Whatever you did, it followed it. If my screen followed you now I had an option at the top to stop following you. So you could have stopped me from following you. Or I could stop from following you.

Brent Warner 15:51
Yeah, so from a teacher’s perspective, this is great, right? Because you’re like, hey, everybody stop for just a second, let’s take a look at what I’m doing. And then I can click a button and all the students no matter where they are on the board. So again, let’s imagine the physical room, right? I’ve got students all the way across my room, and they’re, they’re interacting with the whiteboard. And then I say, Hey, everybody, let’s take a look. And then you know what happens in the physical classroom, they all walk together, they kind of zoom, they kind of look at what you’re writing, or whatever you’re doing. And then you say, Okay, now go back to your own work, right. And then they go, they move back. And so this is the digital version of that, where it’s like, Hey, I’m going to click a button, everybody will be brought to focus the attention on whatever I’m, I’m looking at, and then it will go back the other and then they could click that button move back out to their own spots. By the way, it doesn’t just have to be the teacher, they can say, I could say for example, Hey, you guys, check out what Tim is doing right? Now. They can click on your name, and then they could go follow along with you know, what you what you’re doing. And I can say, Hey, Tim, can you explain this to everybody what you mean by this, and then you would kind of be in the spotlight, so to speak, right. And so I really love that ability to focus in and see what the one person is seeing it’s like, but it’s still interact double. So it’s almost like the share screen on Zoom. But you can keep moving with things. But you don’t have to stay in that share screen version. And so I like the flexibility there.

Tim Van Norman 17:09
So along those lines, you also as the teacher can click on somebody’s name, and go see what they’re looking at. Without having everybody join you, you can go see, oh, Tim’s looking at this, Brent’s looking at this, you know, each person, what are they interacting with? What where are they in this? Yeah, maybe they’re asking a question. Maybe they’re whatever, you can click on it and go up. That’s where they are.

Brent Warner 17:38
And maybe they’re not doing anything. (laughter)

Tim Van Norman 17:41
Maybe they’re not doing anything. Maybe that’s what you’re wondering is what are they doing?

Brent Warner 17:46
Yeah, so So a really cool feature inside of there. Another one here, Tim two, I think this is maybe as you get a little bit more advanced, but they have widgets in here. So you can kind of bring in outside little mini apps into it. Tons and tons of these things, right. So so they have like a selfie cam. So if you kind of want to just like take a picture of yourself and say like how you’re doing something, or maybe there’s some sort of physical part to it, you could bring in dice. So if you said, Hey, you guys are going to be playing a game, we’re going to turn this into, you’re gonna make a format of a board game inside of here, and you guys are going to roll the dice in order to do these things, you can poke holes in there, there’s tons and tons of different things that have been developed. And so so just to be able to add the interactive elements into it as students are working their way through something. And then one that I found in there too, for my students that I really loved was the the voice memo, one that you can leave, so you can click a button. And you can leave a 32nd voice memo on there. And so for my students, you know, it might be a little quick speaking activity, it might be, you know, something like that. And so I think there’s a lot of cool flexibility. You know, even just down the line, we could just listen to students talking and you know, and hey, you guys can respond to each other with Voice Memos. So there’s a lot of cool possibilities there too.

Tim Van Norman 19:03
And just these interactions, these, it’s amazing. And it’s neat to be able to see that, again, as we were talking Padlet has a number of these features as well. So we’re not in this we’re not saying you can’t use Padlet anymore, you have to go this way or anything like that. As you said before, look at your use case. What do you try to do? You might look at this and go wow, this is too open i It’s got too many possibilities. I need some structure Padlet will work well. You might also look at Padlet and go you know it’s too structured, I need some freedom. This might work well so so think about that. This is not an either or this might be an end but add it specifically in your environment. So one of the other cool features is a timer. So you can set up a timer at however many minutes okay, I want you guys to work on this for three minutes and then actually has a timer at the top, that for three minutes would count down that three minute timer for something or five minutes or, or something like that those types of tools are really key to helping people understand and stay engaged. Yeah. And that’s what this is all about is getting those students keeping the students engaged.

Brent Warner 20:23
The thing I like about that is it just really shows the thoughtfulness that they put into all the aspects, right was like, Okay, you’re really seeing what people need when they’re interacting with these things, right? So like that timer, you know, it’s not totally unnecessary if you’re in an online class, or whatever. But you could say, like, hey, it makes a difference. It’s also non it’s a, it’s a very gentle timer, right? So it’s like, so when you hear the sounds of it, it’s not like a band. It’s like, it’s like, it’s like, Okay, we’re done with this type of thing. But, but it’s easy, it’s quick, it’s not non intrusive, it’s up there in the top bar with every everything else. So it’s really easy to interact with. One last little feature that I liked inside of here is the commenting, right, you can comment anywhere. So you can just go, you can leave a little note like this is like you can do in Google Docs, for example, is just go highlight something and say, hey, I want to leave a comment of my understanding. And again, I didn’t play with jam board that much. But a lot of people complained about jam board for not having that feature, which is like, Why does all the Google features have a commenting thing, but not here. And so you could just go in and say something quickly, like, if you go in and focus, if you use that spotlight to go see what a student’s doing, they start writing something, you could just do a little good job looking good, right type of thing, and just leave a quick little comment for them as they’re going. And so just a another nice feature that’s non intrusive, for what can get a little bit confusing inside of, you know, like, what’s going on? Who’s doing things? What did I say anything, right? And so just a little quick way to keep track of your own work and your your students work as you’re going through things?

Tim Van Norman 21:58
Absolutely. It’s got a lot of neat things that way. But one of the other. I don’t know if this fits with student management, or if this fits with feature, but you can hide things. So what do I mean by that? So I’m thinking about a presentation that I would want to do, I’d want to have it set up and I’d want my PowerPoint to be set be in there or my Google slide. But I don’t want somebody going to that ahead of time. Right? I want that to be available at the end or something like that. Well, you could literally have it hidden and then at the end of your presentation, unlock it. And boom, that comes up. And now that’s available to them. So in the middle of your, your class, you could open up different tools.

Brent Warner 22:47
Yeah, so you’d have to build it somewhere else, and then cut and paste it in or anything like that, you just have it hidden, and then click a button to open it up. And so it reveals so it’s all still in the same board. And by the end, everybody sees the same thing. Right? It’s it’s all it’s all collective. Right? It’s all unified, but but revealed in the process of your class lesson. Right? Exactly. Yeah, I do think that’s part of kind of student management. Another thing that was not possible will be I think, in JAM board was locking things down, right. And so it’d be like, maybe a student’s trying to move from one section of the page to the other. And they accidentally click and drag, and then they throw some element off of, you know, whatever. And you’re like, Wait, what happened? Where did things go, right? And so, so what this does is, if you lock something as the teacher, then that means students cannot move anything around in that section. They can’t, I think they also can’t interact with it anymore. But they also can’t, they also can’t move things. So again, we’re still learning these bits. But but the ability to lock things down is great to be able to say, hey, we’re not moving. We’re not doing this thing anymore. But but we still want it there for people to see, but not necessarily accidentally get rid of, for example. So that’s really powerful. And then, Tim to wrap things up here, too. We didn’t really talk about this pre show, but but the revision history also right.

Tim Van Norman 24:16
Big deal. So 30 days for the completely free account. And I believe it’s theoretically unlimited for the for the educator or pro account. That’s amazing to have that much revision history available and see where things were and and backup. That’s what Google has taught us is easy for them to do. So why not?

Brent Warner 24:41
Well, not only that, when you’re talking about like 30 students all on one document and being able to go through and pretty pretty well organized to be able to see what’s going on with it. So So So you say hey, a teacher like a student comes in and says hey, I think I messed something up. You can just go back into what they’re they are working on Take a quick look and then make a make a change back to say, hey, you accidentally deleted this thing or whatever else it is. And so, revision history is, I mean, it’s huge for me in Google Docs, for example, and to be able to say, like, on a big interactive, you know, sometimes I’ve done revision history when I have all of my students working on Google slides together, and it’s like, oh, my gosh, where is it, and then, but I had five students that did important things after the student made this mistake, and B, but before they came and talk to me about it, so I can’t go back, you know. And so there’s a lot of freedom from what I understand and this revision history to kind of customize that revision, which is big.

Tim Van Norman 25:37
And remember, also, you can export, so you can make a copy. So whenever I do go to revision history, I take whatever I’ve got now, and I make a copy of it. And then I go back through the Revision History original, just for that very reason, you at least know what people have done after the fact. Yeah, that’s smart. But those are the types of things that are built in. There, one of the other parts we really didn’t talk about, but you do have the ability to share dial up, it’s kind of obvious, as we’re talking about in classroom settings and stuff like that. But this can be between colleagues. This can be there’s a concept of teams, and stuff like that, so, so think about, you can think about a lot of different aspects of this. And consider what would work well, in your environment. And like I said, you can always export, you can import, you could export it from a presentation or something like that, and then import it to your own big jam board. So love it,

Brent Warner 26:43
love it. Lots of cool things to play with. So I just want to encourage people to look at it. If you were like me with jam board, and you’re kind of like, yeah, it’s kind of weird. It’s kind of clunky. It doesn’t really make sense. And I actually heard a lot about big jam over the last several months. And people were kind of saying, hey, it’s the thing, it’s the thing. And I just kind of, you know, blew it up. Because people have said, basically, it’s like, it’s like the new jam board. And I’m like, well, for not for me, right. But now that I’m looking at it more closely, I’m actually really thinking about ways that I can bring it in my class ways that I can have my students interacting with it. Also, with teachers, as you know, if we’re doing professional development things or having people work together on shared ideas, I think there’s a lot of possibilities here. So, so and a treat, right. That’s the other great part for if you’re an educator if you’re in education free, can’t beat it.

Tim Van Norman 27:39
Thank you for listening today. In this episode, we took a look at the end of Google’s jam board, and what fig jam has to offer in its place. For more information about this show, please visit our website at TheHigherEdTechPodcast.com. There you’ll find our podcast and links to the information we’ve covered.

Brent Warner 27:55
As always, we do want your feedback. So please go to TheHigherEdTechPodcast.com. And let us know your thoughts. And if you have ideas for future shows, there’s a link over there where you can give us your topic ideas

Tim Van Norman 28:05
for everyone at IVC. That’s listening. If you need help with technology questions, please contact IVC technical support. If you have questions about technology in your classroom, please stop by the IVC Training Center in a 322 or contact me Tim Van Norman AT tvannorman@ivc.edu.

Brent Warner 28:21
And if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on LinkedIn at @BrentGWarner.

Tim Van Norman 28:26
I’m Tim Van Norman,

Brent Warner 28:28
and I’m Brent Warner and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Take care everybody