Microsoft is today bringing its Whiteboard app to its Education customers. The company is launching a preview for Whiteboard for Edu, which is mostly focused at schools and students. The point of the service is to allow students to collaborate with each other and help teacher brainstorm with all the students in real-time.
Whiteboard for Education is actually much more than that, though. The app actually has more features than the regular version of Whiteboard. It lets you send your whiteboards directly to OneDrive and attach it within your OneNote Notebook, for example.
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The app even lets you change the background of the Whiteboard to reduce eye strain — you can change the color of the background, and even display lines across the whole whiteboard for graphing purposes, etc. The app includes stickers that students can use to add some colors to their Whiteboard, or even use it as a way to give feedback in real time.
But two of the stand out features on Whiteboard for Edu, for me, are the Ink Grab and Ink Beautification features. Ink Beautification simply takes notes written in your handwriting and improves it to be easily readable. Ink Grab, on the other hand, converts pictures of your notes into digital ink, and it’s actually really cool:
6/ For teachers & students who use analog whiteboards, use Ink Grab to convert pictures of your notes into REAL digital ink, making the move from analog to digital seamless. #edtech #eLearning #MIEExpert #MicrosoftEDU #Microsoft pic.twitter.com/Dh2L0VR2sg
— Ian Mikutel (@IanMikutel) November 20, 2018
Whiteboard for Education is available today for Windows 10 devices, and it will be available on the iPad next week. What I am really interested to see if the Ink Beautification and Ink Grab features will be available for other users of Whiteboard, instead of just being an exclusive feature for Education customers. Right now, the new Whiteboard backgrounds are available to regular Whiteboard users, but I couldn’t use any of the other Education-focused features with a regular Office 365 account.
dontbe evil
<p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> Ink Grab and Ink Beautification are AMAZING</span></p>