The College provides access to several collaborative whiteboard tools, which aid faculty and students in discussions and brainstorming activities. Common features include:
- Whiteboard area for writing, drawing, and moving items around
- Pens in various widths and colors
- Text boxes (“sticky notes”) and graphic features such as arrows
- Collaborative activities
In general, these tools work best with pens on tablet devices (e.g. the latest iPads), are more difficult to use with fingers on touch screens or trackpads, and are much harder to use with a regular mouse.
Explain Everything
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How Amherst Faculty are using it:
- create video-based microlectures, student projects, interactive features (currently being explored)
Features:
- Infinite whiteboard
- Project Templates
- Cloud-based
- Synchronous & asynchronous activities
- Animation creation
- Screencast video creation
- Audio and video recorded by your computer
- Insertion of images, PDFs as images, videos, audio files, Powerpoints, and live Web pages
- “Laser” pointer
- Pagination
HOW TO GET STARTED: Contact askIT@amherst.edu to request an account
Google Jamboard
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How Amherst Faculty are using it:
- brainstorming, iterative drafting, collaboration, synchronous and asynchronous text-based discussion
Features:
- Whiteboard environment
- Cloud-based
- Synchronous and asynchronous activities
- Google Docs integration
- Insertion of images
- “Laser” pointer
- Pagination
HOW TO GET STARTED: Visit jamboard.google.com
Zoom
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How Amherst Faculty are using it:
- hosting online classes and office hours, increasing student engagement during remote learning, collaborative synchronous reading discussion/annotation
Features:
- Integrated video meetings
- Breakout rooms feature to enable small group discussions with their own whiteboards
- Recording lectures and other course content
- Synchronous activities
- Polling
- Chat
- Moodle integration
- “Laser” pointer
HOW TO GET STARTED: Visit https://amherstcollege.zoom.us/ to access your account, and read this page on using annotation in Zoom.