http://scribblar.com

The basics

“Simple, effective online collaboration. Multi-user whiteboard, live audio, image collaboration, text-chat and more”. Many forms of online synchronous communication are offered, all centred around a shared whiteboard.  Signup is easy; it’s free with most features. It works well and is used by educators around the world:

Knowledge networking

Scribblar’s great advantage is in bringing together words (either text or voice) and images at the same time. While many subjects can rely just on words to know them, many more have fundamental visual elements to them. Holding the images and the words together, in the same screen space, and with the opportunity of individuals to move, shape or otherwise ‘play’ with those imagines reveals the importance of networked digital media for changing how we do knowledge work at distance and, moreover, because each person has their own terminal, able to see and interact with the whiteboard directly, such distributed knowledge work can be more productive than being in the same room, with just one white board. Knowledge networking brings individuals together, but individuals retain more tools and affordances than if collected in a group.

Pedagogic Challenge

Online synchronous discussions and classes can become very difficult to control and manage if large numbers of participants are involved. Even with careful management and good intent, people’s communications can become disordered and somewhat random because of lags in connection times and a general different in people’s ability to interact in real time. The challenge for teachers is, once everyone is gathered at the same time, to impose sufficient structure on the event that it works, but does not become overly didactic. Maybe the main challenge is to convince students that real=time interaction doesn’t necessarily equate to the best learning approach, even when it feels culturally as if it should by giving students direct access to the teacher.

One scenario for using this tool

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Tools should often be approached for adaption to educational use by thinking about their ‘alternative’ uses – things which are not the main or expected function, but which can work very well for teaching and learning. In this case, the teacher in a unit on environmental planning requires students studying fully externally to all be present at the given time to participate in the real-time interaction. The teacher uploads a series of images that relate to ecological disasters and poses a question  with them: students then discuss the imagines using text chat, with occasional guidance from the teacher. All of the images are freely available to all students. At the end of the presentation, each student picks an imagine and explains, in ways that draw on the concepts within the unit, what has happened.

Scribblar:

• has multiple uses, so long as it is realtime and involves words and images; and
• requires careful management with large numbers of students.

Alternatives

Skrbl and Dabbleboard would work very well in place of Scribblar. Emerging Edtech writer Walsh discusses six possible tools, including Scribblar.

Further discussion and concepts

Dawson, P. 2010. Networked interactive whiteboards : rationale, affordances and new pedagogies for regional Australian higher education. Australasian journal of educational technology, 26.4: 523-533.

Hewett, B. 2006. Synchronous online conference-based instruction: A study of whiteboard interactions and student writing. Computers and Composition, 23.1: 4-31.

Mowbray, L et al. 2010. Minimising the distance, maximising the learning: Successful selection and implementation of an online virtual whiteboard for tutorial sessions. Proceedings ASCILITE Conference Sydney, 645-654.