How does the online whiteboard work for students?

Our interactive whiteboard is simple to use with an intuitive interface, making collaborating with your tutor easy. Check out our video below which will introduce you to all the amazing features…

You can find the transcript for the video below.

Welcome to your whiteboard, where all of your online lessons take place. You and your tutor will be able to collaborate on resources together using the whiteboard. You’ll be able to draw, type, create shapes, add images and much more during your lessons. 

Let’s go through the features of the whiteboard together so you know how to get the most out of your lessons.

Up at the top are your tabs. Right now, my tutor has 3 tabs open ready for our lesson. I’m on the first tab now, called ‘Welcome’. 

By right clicking on a tab, you can see some options. You can lock a tab so it cannot be closed. 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  see what we can do on our whiteboard using the toolbar. The toolbar is this section which runs along the top. 

First is the select tool, which you can 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. If I hover over this image for example, you’ll see it doesn’t grey out like the other images do, which means the item has been locked by my tutor. If I try to erase it, it won’t work. 

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 the formula F=ma. And I’m also going to create the graph f(x) = sinx

If you’d like to insert a saved image, you can use the upload an image or PDF tool. 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.

The video snapshot tool lets you take a snapshot of your video feed or your tutor’s video feed. So if you want to quickly transfer anything you’re doing on camera into the whiteboard, you can press take video snapshot of my video. Or if you want to screenshot what your tutor is doing, press to snapshot your tutor’s video. The snapshot will then automatically insert straight into the whiteboard.

With all of these elements, if you click on them, you can resize and rotate them. You can also delete the element by 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.

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.

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.

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

The options button on the far right side allows you to 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. This will save all of the tabs you and your tutor have collaborated on today as a ZIP file. 

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 during your lessons. I’ve now joined the lesson on my tablet, which is shown by this secondary video feed. Your tutor will be able to use their tablet during their lesson too.

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. For example, my tutor has given me some equations to solve here, so I can write them using the draw tool.

For now, I’m going to put this away and show you the rest of the features using my desktop.

Now I’m going to tell you a bit about the access controls that are set by your tutor. You might not always be able to edit the contents of the whiteboard or change tabs. This depends on whether your tutor has enabled leading mode and read only mode.

First let me introduce you to leading mode. My tutor has now enabled leading mode, which I can see because their video feed has a little crown icon on it.

When leading mode is enabled, you follow your tutor’s view. If they change tabs, you will follow them onto that tab. If they move around the whiteboard, you will automatically follow them around the whiteboard. 

You won’t be able to change tabs yourself when your tutor is in leading mode. If I try to change tabs now, you’ll see I get a notification at the bottom of my screen telling me this isn’t possible. If you right click the tabs, you’ll notice you can’t delete them or lock them either. Also, you won’t be able to move around the canvas yourself. If you look in the toolbar here, you might notice the move canvas tool and the zoom tool aren’t there anymore. This is because moving around the canvas is disabled now.

Leading mode is a really helpful tool when your tutor is explaining or demonstrating something to you because you don’t have to go searching around the whiteboard to see where they are, they’re right in front of you. You’ll also still be able to use all of the editing tools as long as your tutor has disabled read only mode, so I can still draw, add equations and everything else. 

Now let’s talk about read-only mode. If your tutor turns on read-only mode, you won’t be able to make edits onto the whiteboard. You’ll get a notification down at the bottom of the whiteboard explaining that read-only mode is enabled, explaining you won’t be able to edit anything. I can’t type, draw, or anything else, I can only read the resources. If I try to draw anything, it won’t work. 

Right now, both leading mode and read-only mode are switched on, so I can’t move around or edit. My tutor is now going to switch off leading mode, but keep read only mode on. Because leading mode is disabled, I can go between the tabs and I can move around the whiteboard. But, because read-only mode is on, as you can see, I’m still unable to edit anything. 

When leading mode is off, you’ll be able to see which tab your tutor is on because there’s a coloured line on the tab up here. If I go to the tab they’re on, this coloured box with their name on it lets me know what they’re viewing at the moment, and I can see their cursor too.

Now my tutor has disabled leading mode and read-only mode, meaning I have full access to edit the whiteboard, and I can go through the tabs as I please. 

If your tutor has turned off both leading mode and read-only mode, you will also be able to create tabs and upload documents.

You can create a new tab by clicking the plus in the top left corner. 

Here, you can choose to:

• Create a new blank whiteboard

• Create a document tab, where you can type. 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.

You’ll be able to upload any PDFs by clicking 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.

So, say your tutor wants you to upload some homework into the current whiteboard page called ‘exam questions’. I’m going to use the upload image or PDF tool to upload a document from my files.

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 press deselect all and select those 4 pages.

You can choose to import the page in a single whiteboard tab, your current whiteboard tab, or over multiple seperate tabs. I’m going to import my PDF in the current tab. And there’s my homework uploaded onto the whiteboard, so now me and my tutor can go through it together. If I select the pan tool, I can scroll to see the other pages of my homework below.

There’s a few more features visible on the right of our whiteboard. On this panel on the top right, we can change our video layouts. The video grid brings up you and your tutor’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 tutor’s video feed, you can toggle their video feed on and off and pop out their video. 

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 and the status of your tutor, like their Wi-Fi connection.

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’re confused about what your tutor is talking about, you can send them a little shrug.  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 https://www.thelessonspace.com/. Also, feel free to get in contact with us at https://www.pmt.education/support/ if there’s anything else we can help you with