Introducing Zoom Whiteboards
Zoom Meetings are an essential tool for any course that needs to meet remotely or in a hybrid format at Meredith, but we all know that sometimes online meetings can seem like they’re lacking some of the comforts of the traditional classroom. The whiteboard shouldn’t be one of those “missing” comforts as Zoom has created an excellent alternative to the traditional whiteboard.
The Zoom whiteboard is conveniently built into the Zoom client and can be launched on the fly or prepared in advance to deploy during a meeting. In addition to being at your fingertips during a meeting, these whiteboards can be easily shared to your meeting participants both before and after the meeting via link from the Zoom web portal or exported as an image file.
The Zoom whiteboard could easily become a replacement to using the traditional whiteboard as it provides a huge amount of flexibility when it comes to collaboration by allowing all participants to contribute while providing the convenience of taking your work with you to pick up where you left off ready to jump right back into things next session.
Getting Started with Zoom Whiteboards
To get started with Zoom Whiteboard, you’ll need to be using Zoom client 5.10.3 or later. This should already be the case for most of our users as we regularly require Zoom updates to be applied before joining meetings.
- Sign into your Zoom account using the Zoom client on your device or web browser.
- Select the Whiteboards tab, and choose New Whiteboard to start a whiteboard.
- To view your whiteboards, select the ‘My Whiteboards’ tab. You can also select ‘Shared with Me’ to view whiteboards that have been shared with you.
- To share a digital whiteboard you’ve created, open the whiteboard you wish to share, select the Share button, and type the contact or email you wish to share the board with.
Use Cases… just look at the templates!
The uses for the Zoom whiteboard are too numerous to count in this short post. A quick look at the templates section in the Zoom Whiteboard client will give you tons of ideas to get started.
Just a quick look at the templates shows Zoom has been very thorough giving users easy access to many of the most common uses for whiteboards including:
- Icebreaker Activities
- Brainstorming templates
- Idea Mapping and Sentence Diagraming
- Pro/Con Charts
- Weekly Planning tools
- Party Planning Checklists
- and so much more…
Final Thoughts and Additional Resources
I hope this has piqued your interested in exploring Zoom Whiteboard. Remember, you don’t have to be in a meeting to start a whiteboarding session. This is an entirely standalone product but integrates smoothly with the Zoom ecosystem. Below you’ll find some handy resources to help answer any questions you might have while exploring the product.
- Using the Zoom Whiteboard – Comprehensive instructions from Zoom on the Whiteboard feature