How does the online whiteboard work for tutors?

Our interactive whiteboard is simple to use with an intuitive interface, making collaborating with your students easy. It features an integrated resource library, LaTeX and more. Check out our video below which will introduce you to all the amazing features…

You can also find the transcript for the video below.

Here’s your online whiteboard for this lesson. Up at the top are your tabs. Right now I have one tab open, called “Whiteboard 1”. To create a new tab, you can click the plus in the top left corner.

Here, you can choose to:

• Create a new blank whiteboard, like the one I have open now, 

• Create a document tab, where you can type, which looks like this. Document tabs are handy for writing-based lessons as you have more control over formatting in the toolbar.

• Or create a code tab, where you can choose from various syntax

Today, we’re going to focus on whiteboard tabs. 

You can choose to work with a blank whiteboard page, or upload your own resources and work on those. 

There’s a few ways to upload your own resources into the whiteboard and I’m going to take you through all of them. 

You can choose to upload a PDF or office document up here in the top left corner. This will bring up your computer’s file explorer where you can pick your files. You can also choose to upload a ZIP file below if you’d like to open up a past lesson space which you have exported previously.

You can also upload files and images directly onto the whiteboard using the upload image or PDF tool here in the toolbar, which will also bring up your file explorer.

You can access your uploaded resources by navigating to the insert resource tool here. In the personal tab, you will find your own resources that you’ve previously uploaded to the resource library. These resources will stay available in the library after your lesson is finished, so you can easily access them again, and again, in your future lessons. You can also find resources from PMT in the organisation tab.

I’m going to use the insert resource tool to access a file I’ve already uploaded to my library before the lesson, which you can see here on the left hand side.

You can select which pages you want to upload in the next section. So I’m going to upload the first 4 pages not including the title page, so I’ll deselect everything and then select those pages.

You can choose to import the page in a single whiteboard tab, your current whiteboard tab, or over multiple tabs. I’m going to import my PDF in multiple tabs, so I can have 1 tab for each section of my lesson.

By right clicking on a tab, you can see some options. You can lock a tab so it cannot be closed. This is handy to make sure you or your student don’t accidentally close the tab. You can choose whether you want to allow edits on the tab or not. You can also rename, duplicate, and download the tab as an image

If you have a lot of tabs, you’ll be able to see them in a list view by clicking this icon with the 3 lines. If you do accidentally delete a tab, you  will be able to access them and restore them here, in the deleted tabs section.

Let’s go to our first tab and see what we can do on our whiteboard using the toolbar.The toolbar is this section which runs along the top. 

You’ll see I’ve added a PDF file and some illustrations so I can demonstrate the features of the toolbar.

First is the select tool, which you can also access by pressing S on the keyboard. When using the select tool, you can click and drag images, shapes and drawings around your canvas.

Next is the move canvas tool. Click and drag to move around your canvas. You can also pan around your canvas at any point by holding right click and dragging.

Now we have the draw, highlighting, and erase tool. 

The draw tool, which can also be selected by pressing D on the keyboard, lets you draw on the page. You can choose how thick you want your line to be in the drop down, and you can also choose the colour by going into the colour tool on the far left hand side, and changing the line colour. To draw a straight line, hold down Ctrl or your computer’s equivalent while drawing.

The highlight tool can be accessed by typing H. You can change the colour and draw a straight line just like the draw tool.

To erase anything on the board, press E or click the eraser tool on the toolbar. You can remove any shapes, text, images and PDFs with the eraser tool. The eraser will only delete items which are unlocked. You can lock an item by selecting it and clicking the lock button on the left hand side. To unlock the item, toggle the lock button again.

You should always make sure your PDFs are locked so you don’t lose the resources you’re working on with your student. 

As you can see, when I try to erase an unlocked PDF, the whole thing will be deleted. But if I lock this PDF, and then try to erase it, it doesn’t budge. This is very handy for when you want to erase any annotations or typing on your PDF, but not the PDF behind it. But don’t worry, if you accidentally delete anything you can use the undo button up here in the toolbar.

Next we have our shape tool, where you can draw different shapes. You can change the outline and fill colour using the colour tool. You can also draw a perfect shape by holding Ctrl or your computer’s equivalent. 

The text tool allows you to type on your whiteboard. You can also access this by pressing T on the keyboard. Double click to edit the text after you’ve written it

The equation tool allows you to insert formulas and graphs into your whiteboard. You can insert various symbols here, and you’ll also notice our whiteboard is also fully compatible with LaTex commands too.  I’m going to enter this formula (F=ma) And I’m also going to create a graph (f(x)=sinx).

If you’d like to insert a saved image, you can upload an image or PDF using this tool which we’ve seen already.. You can also insert images by pasting them from your clipboard using Ctrl+V or your computer’s equivalent. You can also drag and drop them straight into the whiteboard from your files.

And we’ve already discussed the insert resource tool, I’ll skip that. 

The video snapshot tool lets you take a snapshot of your video feed. So if I want to quickly transfer anything I’m doing on camera into the whiteboard, you can press take video snapshot of my video the snapshot will then automatically insert straight into the whiteboard. 

With all of these elements, if you click on them, you can edit the colour or the content, as well as resize and rotate them. You can choose to lock the elements, meaning they cannot be deleted or moved around until you unlock them. As you can see here, as I have locked this drawing, it will not erase and some other options are greyed out. You will still be able to duplicate the item using the duplicate button.

If an element is unlocked, you can choose to bring it forward or send it back. You can also delete the element by toggling the bin icon or pressing backspace on your keyboard.. If you’ve made a mistake at any point, you can also choose to undo and redo actions by clicking the undo or redo arrow. You can also press Ctrl + Z and Ctrl Y, or your computer’s equivalent

Next to the video snapshot tool, you can change your background. For example, I think I would like a yellow background with grid lines, but I’d actually like these grid lines to be a bit bigger, and black. Or maybe I want some lines instead, but I think I’d prefer these blue.

You can zoom in and out of the whiteboard using your mouse or the zoom tool. And if at any point you’ve lost where you were or want to see your whole whiteboard you can zoom to fit and it will bring you back to your working space.

Our whiteboards are also fully compatible with tablets. Just login and launch the lesson on your tablet, and you’ll be able to use it to support your lessons. As you can see, I’ve now joined the lesson on my tablet, which is shown by this secondary video feed. On here, I can also draw, highlight, add shapes and everything else, but I’ve got a bit more control because I can use my stylus. But for now, I’m going to put this away and show you the rest of the features using my desktop.

You can finish your lesson by clicking the end session button, and clicking ‘end session for all’ in the drop down.

You can see the participants of the whiteboard here, and if you click this you’ll be able to pull up your chat as well.

The leading tool, which is this crown icon, allows you to choose the view and access of your student. 

When leading mode is enabled, your student follows your view. If you go onto another tab the student will also go to that tab. The two coloured lines on the tab signals they are with you on that tab. 

If you move to a different area of the whiteboard, the student’s view will also follow yours. This coloured box indicates what your student is currently looking at.

If you turn off leading mode, your student can go between the tabs as they please, and they will not follow your view.

Read only mode stops the student from making any edits to the document.

You can set a timer or a stop watch here. The stopwatch allows you to keep track of how long a task takes.

The timer can either be set to go off at a specific end time, so I can choose for this timer to go off for 16:30, which is in 59 minutes.

You can also choose between 15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, or choose a custom time. For example, if I set a timer for 5 seconds, when it’s up it’ll alert me by turning red. I’m going to set a 1 hour timer now because my lesson is going to be an hour long, so this will remind me when we’ve run out of time for today. I can keep track of how long I have left by hovering over the timer, or I can cancel and pause by clicking on it.

You can toggle full screen mode here if you want a better view.

The options button on the far right side allows you to open the leading tools, change your language, whether you want to view your whiteboard in dark mode or light mode, and also whether you’d like to export your whiteboards for today. 

Once your lesson is finished, you can export the whiteboard using the export button on the right hand side here. This will save all of the tabs you and your student have collaborated on today as a ZIP file. Your lesson will be auto-exported into a ZIP file after your lesson ends, so you’ll be able to reuse a past lesson with a different student if you want to. 

On the right hand side we can change our video layouts. The video grid brings up you and your student’s video feeds. The video sidebar puts us on the right hand side out of the way so the whiteboard is clear, and the floating videos put our video feed as mobile boxes which you can place anywhere on the whiteboard.

By clicking the 3 dots in the bottom right corner of your student’s video feed, you can toggle their video feed on and off and pop out their video. As the leader of the session, you can mute their microphone and turn off their video, or if their microphone and video are off  you can send them a request to turn them on.

In the bottom right hand corner you’ll see some more icons. In settings, you’ll be able to troubleshoot if video or audio feeds aren’t working properly. Here, you can check your own status. You’ll also be able to see what issues your student is having by clicking their name. So I can’t see my student’s video right now, but the troubleshooter tells me they’ve blocked access, and I can advise them how to fix this.

You can also report an issue here or check your device set up. There’s some more handy features like background blurs and noise cancellation too. 

You can share your screen using the button below.

You can toggle your microphone and video feed here. 

Hovering on the chat icon will bring up reactions, so if you want to congratulate your student you can send them some confetti. Clicking will bring up the chat. You can also send files in the bottom left corner of the chat window.

And that’s an overview of all the features of our whiteboard. If you’re stuck with anything, you can check out the whiteboard’s support page at www.thelessonspace.com/. Also, feel free to get in contact with us at www.pmt.education/support/ if there’s anything else we can help you with.