Use any shared window as a whiteboard in Zoom

Zoom has a built-in whiteboard which is exactly that: a blank white space for you or your students to write on using Zoom’s annotations bar. One nice use of this whiteboard is to assign individual students to write their own responses to exercises or items they have previously completed. Each student can create their own text box and enter their text. Or they can use the “draw” option to write their text by hand. 

We covered how an instructor might use the Annotation feature in an earlier post. Briefly, here’s how the students can access the annotation tools in Zoom.

When anyone shares their screen, you can access the annotations tool from the menu at the top of the Zoom screen.

Click the black button at the top center of the screen to call up a pulldown menu:

Select “Annotate”

Now you can select any of the tools to begin populating the whiteboard:

But what if you want students to mark up a text or to highlight images? The whiteboard in Zoom is only a blank canvas, similar to a whiteboard in the classroom. The good news is that you or your students can mark up any window you share in Zoom. The Annotation tools work whenever someone shares their screen or window. So you can share a picture, for example, and have students identify the objects in the picture:

 Or you can share a text (web page, Word document, PDF, Google Doc...) and ask students to identify specific aspects of the text by drawing or writing on the screen. 

Or you can share a document with a list options and ask students to indicate their preferences through the “Stamp” annotation tool -- a heart or a checkmark or a star -- and thereby gauge the preferences of the class as a kind of instant poll. 

And now you can also hover over any annotation to see who made it. 

There are certain limitations to using Annotations in Zoom: 

• You are limited to one screen that everyone can draw or write on
• Annotations do not work on Chromebooks, so if you or your students use Chromebooks, you won’t be able to use the Annotations feature.

Look to upcoming tips where we explore options to the Zoom whiteboard and Zoom Annotations.