 Hello, my amazing math minds and welcome to this week's Math Tip Monday. My name is Heidi Rathmeyer from ESU 8. And this week I want to talk about a digital whiteboard called Whiteboard Phi. First of all, it is free. And I know you have a lot of options out there for digital whiteboards, but this one I liked in particular for several reasons. The pros in terms of this whiteboard are there are no accounts needed for either the teacher or the student. So it's very easy to create on the fly. You can save the work of your students. And the teacher can actually watch the students in real time. And you can push boards to your students so you can create specific backgrounds. You can bring in images, all kinds of things, and then push those to the students so that they can work on those. So this isn't necessarily just a math tool. I think it can be used for any content area. Now, some cons in terms of this particular whiteboard is because the teacher is not creating an account, you can't save whiteboards that you could then use for the future. So you just have to recreate them. And the boards are individual. It's not intended to be collaborative. Maybe you're familiar with Jamboard, and that's available through your Google Suite, which is a collaborative whiteboard. This one is meant to be individual. However, there are some advantages to it compared to Jamboard. So let's take you to the website and I'll walk you through it. So when you go to the whiteboard.fi website, here is where you can create a new class where students can join the class. And I'll show you another way that that can happen as well. So as the teacher, you're going to create a new class. You can just put in your name, just say SR. You can enable a waiting room if you want to make sure only your students are coming in and the enable manual save mode may be beneficial for students who might struggle with bandwidth. So that's something to consider if you have students that are struggling with it being real time. So we can create the new class and there is a URL you could push to the students or they could go to the fi website and put in this code. I'll show you that as well. Or if you have students at home with an iPad or even a phone they could do this on, you could give them the QR code, which will send them to the room. So several options there. All right, so I've created a split screen so you can see what the student side looks like, which will be on the left and the teacher side, which will be on the right. So if a student comes to this particular website, if, for example, they did not use the QR code, they can join the class. So I'll punch in that code. They will put in their name and then join the class. Okay, and there are two views for the students. They can see the teacher's whiteboard or if they close that this will be their whiteboard where they can work on it. So now if I come back over to the teacher side on the right, again, this is my whiteboard. And if I scroll to the bottom, I can see two student whiteboards and one is on an iPad. That's Anna. I'll open it back up. You can see it. She wasn't active for a while because my iPad went to sleep. And then this is William's whiteboard over here. So I can see their work in real time. So several different tools up here you can write. And again, if I come over to the students whiteboard, if they want to see my whiteboard, if I just want them to be watching what I'm doing, two things you could do. One is you could just share your screen or you could ask them to go to the teacher's whiteboard. So they could see everything that you are doing. And students have these tools as well. So we could do some shapes. I'm going to do some work with shapes. We can type. Which one is the circle? For our higher math, we can insert a math equation. So we could do fractions. And I could insert that math. You can also do exponents with the carrot. And then you can insert that math. And move it around where you need it. You can make it smaller, make it bigger. OK, again, over on the student, they could see what I'm doing all this time. But their whiteboard is still empty. So I am going to add a new whiteboard. And let's say I just want to take this particular equation. And I want to put it on this new whiteboard. And now I want to push it out to the students and have them solve it. So I can push. I can push to all students, all pages. Or I can push the current page. And I can push it as a background. This would be what I recommend. Because if you don't do that, they can change the equation. So if you push it as a background, then they can no longer edit that, which I think is an issue with Jamboard, where if they clear the screen, they clear the background as well. So in this case, they wouldn't be able to do that. So I can push it to the students. Keep in mind, though, whenever you push something to the students, whatever was pushed before will be deleted. So it will replace all the whiteboards that they have. So I'm going to go ahead and push that to the students. So you can see now that it's been pushed to the students. So now they can work on the equation. And then as they're working, I can see their work over on the right-hand side down here. Now I could see that Anna's whiteboard was not active because she was asleep. And notice it did not push it to hers. So I can actually select her name. And I can push the whiteboard to her as a background. So now she has it as well. So if you have a student that comes in late, you can still push a whiteboard to that student. So again, now I can watch the student work on their whiteboard and a little lapse in time. But it should show up over here. So I can see what their students are doing. So I can open it up and take a closer look at it. Some other actions that you have in terms of the students, you can erase their whiteboard. You can kick the student out. And you would actually kick them out of the class. So they would have to come back into the class. That's always a good option to have as well. You can save the whiteboard. You can copy it to the teacher's whiteboard. So maybe I want to show this particular student's work so I can copy it to the teacher's whiteboard. You could also share your screen if you wanted to and show student work. Another nice setting that you have is that you can hide the student name. So if you do want to show several pieces of work, you can hide their names. And then you could come down here and show several different whiteboards to help students with common mistakes or to show different strategies. So let's say now I want to save these whiteboards and go to another activity. So what you can do is save all whiteboards as a PDF. So that's great as a teacher. You can also bring in images. So I'm gonna bring in a clock. Now maybe I want my students to show me different times on their clocks. So once again, I have to push it to the students and I'll push it as a background and keep in mind it's going to erase everything that they currently have. So I will push it. And you'll notice now if we come over here on the left-hand side, all their other work is gone but they do have a clock. Now notice students can create additional pages if they want for some of their work. Okay, however, the teacher is only gonna see whatever page that student is on. So right now William is just on a blank page but if I want him to go back to the clock, then the clock will show back up and then I can see William's work on the clock. And notice I sent it as a background image so he cannot edit my clock but he can write over it. Right, there's some other settings you can play with here. You can add a grid background. You can even add a music background while you can insert some emojis if you wish. That might be a little dangerous as a tool for the students but I'm pretty sure they have it as well. Yes, they do. But the math equation is probably the most useful for our math teachers here of course. So as I mentioned, you can save the whiteboards. However, keep in mind it's only gonna save the whiteboards that are active. So in this case, it's gonna save my blank teacher whiteboard and then it will only save the whiteboard images that the students are on. So keep that in mind. When you are done with your session, be sure to close the room, especially if next hour you wanna create a new whiteboard for another class. If you don't do that, it will try to have students join this particular. Now your whiteboard will eventually time out but I'm not sure what the timeframe is but I know I came back a day later and my room was closed. So, but you're gonna do something pretty soon. Make sure you close the room so that you can create a new class. So that is whiteboard fi, a very easy and free digital whiteboard. Certainly there are things that may be more sophisticated for the high school level. But I like this because it's something you could really create on the fly. Perhaps you have students that are quarantined and you wanna make sure that they're involved and then you can share screens between what the students are doing at home with what the students are doing in class or if you need to do your whole class through a digital environment. So please give it a shot and let me know what you think. And until next time, stay well, be kind.