I was recently contacted to provide some information about Jamboard so I thought this was a good opportunity to write a blog post where I could collate some of the online resources that we recommend and share some tips around its use.

What is Jamboard?

Jamboard is essentially an online collaborative whiteboard tool which we all have access to as part of our Google accounts at Brookes. Once created, a Jamboard lives in “the Cloud” and access permissions are managed in a similar way to Google Drive. It’s a great way of getting students to collaborate in online sessions; particularly useful when students are working together in smaller groups (via Breakout rooms) and each group can then share their Jamboards (the “fruits of their labour” from the Breakout rooms) with the other groups once they return to the main room.

Resources

Obviously a Google search will uncover plenty of helpful sites with helpful tips but here are a few that I wanted to highlight:

• Melanie Bashor (Digital Services) ran a comprehensive collaborative session to demonstrate Jamboard and suggest some uses; it’s a great starting point to see Jamboard “in action” and gives a great overview of the tool. The recording lasts around 45 minutes (you’ll need to be logged into your Brookes Panopto account to view the recording);
• Google’s main Jamboard help page offers some step-by-step instructions around using Jamboard;
• How to use Jamboard in the classroom: 20+ tips and ideas – this website provides some good examples of how you could use Jamboard and may prompt you to extend the ideas for use in your own online sessions.

A few tips that I’ve picked up along the way!

• If you’re creating a Jamboard for your students to collaborate on then remember to share it but change the permissions to “Anyone with the link at Brookes … can edit” – otherwise you’ll end up with lots of edit requests;
• Students can obviously create their own Jamboard and share with others via their Google account;
• A Jamboard is a living “document” so you may want to take a snapshot of the content in a Jamboard at a particular moment in time; to do this, you can Download as PDF or Save frame as image (rather than linking to a “live” Jamboard);
• It’s possible to create a template which you might want each student to click on to create their own individual version of the Jamboard; you can do this by creating an initial Jamboard then sharing the link but changing the word “edit” to “copy” at the end of the URL.