Twiddla. Interactive online whiteboard

“Twiddla calls itself a web-based meeting playground. Not only is it a fun way to swap ideas about a website or image, it’s incredibly useful as well“.

We’ve already discussed that when it comes to online teaching we face with many problems: how to share documents so everyone sees them and can work with them, how to make teaching interactive and student-centred, how to upload images and write on them, where do we clarify new structures, how to visualise the grammar. In our previous article, we covered one of many interactive online whiteboards — IDroo. Now, we’ll compare it with another one — Twiddla.

It is another quite helpful and free interactive whiteboard. Here’s the list of features that it has. The main things are the same as in IDroo:

1. You can collaborate with others. You just send the link from the box on the right to join in.
2. You can draw lines, squares, circles; draw with your hand.
3. You can type texts.4. You can use different fonts and colours too.
   5. You can work with formulas and upload documents and images as well.

1. There’s an eraser function and well-known shortcuts work here too.
2. There’s an integrated chat. 
3. Again, you don’t need to download any programmes, it opens in your browser.
4. There are no limitations on the number of people to join.
5. To save the whiteboard you take a snapshot. You can save it as an image, embed it into a webpage or upload again in Twiddla when you need that again.

Special features of this online whiteboard are:

1. You may make different types of grids and tables. For example, you can play crosses and noughts to revise new vocabulary.

2. There’s an Etherpad — it’s a shared document as Google doc that several people can edit at the same time. For example, you can set a task: correct mistakes in the text to focus students on form. Or it’ll work well for delayed error correction. I usually do it at the end of the lesson: I write a list of mistakes or wrong pronunciations and we correct it together with a group.

3. You can have an audio connection there, speak and react with emojis in different ways. This way you don’t need an additional programme, like Skype, to talk with your voice. And you can set classroom discussions or speaking activities in this programme.

4. You can browse websites in this real-time whiteboard. So-called “co-browsing”. You can work on these websites too, mark them up.

It can be used for teaching Practical English. For example, you can teach how to book tickets or order food online. Or you can read the news together and then discuss them.

5. Another great thing is that you don’t need to sign up, you don’t need an account to use Twiddla.

By the way, you can try it and play around right now!

You see how many pluses the interactive whiteboards have and they make teaching online much easier. And how much time they save!