Better communication, collaboration, and teaching with the Microsoft Whiteboard

1. This Skill is Amazing - Welcome to the Whiteboard: And welcome. I'm really glad that you're taking this course on the Microsoft Whiteboard, because I think that in a couple hours from now, you're going to have a powerful tool for collaboration, for creative exploration, for teaching, for training, for business brainstorming. There are so many things you can do with the Microsoft Whiteboard. And in this short course, we're going to get you set up to be successful using the Microsoft Whiteboard in a huge variety of different scenarios. The Microsoft Whiteboard is a little less known than other presentation tools like Microsoft PowerPoint. But in some situations, the Microsoft Whiteboard is actually my preferred way to work and communicate ideas because it allows me to build those ideas in front of the audience and with the audience participation. Or even if I'm trying to sort things out in my own head, it's a great canvas for me to use, just like if you had a whiteboard in your office or in your home. So my name is Frank Bergdll and I've been teaching for over 26 years. I have a master's degree in learning and technology, and I even have a YouTube channel called earning and Technology with Frank. I really enjoy using different tools and technologies that help us learn and be more productive and really help us elevate our skills and work with others more effectively. So the Microsoft Whiteboard course has a number of lessons in it. I've created a lot of short little lessons, so you can come back to this course down the road, if you want to brush up on just one area or another. But we'll go through the Microsoft Whiteboard from beginning, all the way through the different features and some use case scenarios. At the end of this course, you're going to build a Microsoft Whiteboard for any topic that you like in preparation as if you were going to now present that to a group of cohorts or a class that you might be teaching or just anybody that you want to communicate with. So you'll take away some really solid practical skills from this course. L always, I really would like your feedback. In the comments down below, you can give me feedback on different elements of the whiteboard. I can help clarify concepts, and we can all work together to make sure that we're using this tool in the most effective. By the end of the course, you're going to have something in your skill set that a lot of people don't, and it's a pretty amazing thing to know. So let's go take a look at the Microsoft Whiteboard, and thank you again for checking out this course. 2. So much better than PowerPoint: I bet you want to jump right in, start using the Microsoft Whiteboard, learn all of the different features, and we are going to do that in this course. But it is worth taking just a little bit of time to ask ourselves, what can the Microsoft Whiteboard do that we can't do using other tools? And by the end of this course, you're going to have many answers to that question. And we can use the Microsoft Whiteboard as just a one on one replacement with the whiteboard that we might have in our training center. We can have the Microsoft Whiteboard on our computer. We can write on the Microsoft Whiteboard, and then we can have that projected onto a screen or a wall. So that's just a replacement. We can also share the Microsoft Whiteboard remotely. That adds a lot of value. But let's take a look at how I might work with the whiteboard instead of working with a PowerPoint presentation. Typically in a lot of training scenarios, we use Microsoft PowerPoint as the way to guide the conversation, to structure the conversation, and to present ideas. So, let's say, for example, I want to take a class on a backpacking trip. So we're going to go out backpacking, and we want to make sure that the class can pack properly and get their backpacks ready. So typically in a PowerPoint scenario, I'll have the title slide. You can see I've used a template. Looks pretty good. You know, we have the hiking club. We're going to do some packing for camping, and then I'll have a slide and I'll have a picture of a pack on here, and I'll have what I want to share with the students that we're going to put the fuel at the very bottom, the food at the bottom. The second layer is for our sleeping equipment. The top layer is for our clothing. And at the very top, we're going to have a first aid kit. Now, the challenge that I have with this is that this information is basically constructed and shared, but there's no interactivity. There's no way for the students to participate. Just to show you one thing that the Whiteboard can do that we can't do with PowerPoint is here I have a whiteboard, and I've put the backpack on here, and now I could come in here and I could say, you know, packing for our trip. You know, we're going to pack for our camping trip. And I could, if I want to do that in nicer text if my handwriting is not that great. And we'll be doing this throughout the course. I'll show you all of the different features. But now, instead of having the students look at what I think they should do, we could ask questions. So I could come over here and I just scroll out a little bit here, and you can see that I have all these different icons here, and I could say, Okay, what's the first thing that I should put into the backpack? And maybe one of my students says, Well, we want to put our cooking supplies in there, want to make sure that our foods in there. So we're going to take our cooking supply and our foods, and we could say, why do we want to put those at the bottom of the pack? And we could say, Well, I want to put those at the bottom of the pack because if the fuel leaks, I don't want it to be in my I don't want that fuel to in my clothing, and I don't want that fuel to be on my sleeping gear. So that could be the first layer that we're going to do in here, and you can see that it's really easy to do. Now, everything that I'm showing you here, I'm going to show you in more detail in the course, but you get the idea here that what I'm able to do is I'm able to go in and I'm able to have an interactive conversation with the students. And then they could say, you know, the next thing that I'm going is I'm going to bring my sleeping gear over here, and then I'm going to put my clothes here, and then I'm going to put my camping. Where should I put my tent and my sleeping bag? Maybe I want to have my cup at the top, and I definitely want to have my water and my water filter at the top, and I want to have my first aid kit at the very, very top. I want to make sure that I have my hat, even though it's part of clothing at the top. And then we can zoom in, and we can start saying, Okay, let's take the different, the equipment my sleeping gear is going to be in here. And you can see that as I'm talking with my students that I'm able to construct a interactive presentation where the students are participating the packing of this sleeping bag. And as you get familiar and comfortable with the Microsoft Whiteboard, you'll be able to give this style of presentation. You'll be able to, of course, make annotations on here. You'll be able to say, you know, How much room do I have here? You'll be able to highlight elements of the journey. We're going to go through all of that in this course. And really, that's the power of the Microsoft Whiteboard. That's why it's worth learning because we're going to be able to use it as an interactive tool for brainstorming, interactive conversational types of presentations that are really going to make our learning far more effective. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. When you get through the end of this course, you're going to learn many other ways that we can add to this presentation that we can make the whiteboard a fantastic tool for dynamic engaged learning. Let's move on to the next lesson, and I'll start showing you how you can get the Microsoft Whiteboard so that we can begin this journey. 3. Installing (or online access) Getting Whiteboard: That last module, you're probably pretty excited to get going with Microsoft Whiteboard and start taking advantage of all the features. And we're going to do that throughout the entire course. But before we can even begin working with Microsoft Whiteboard, we actually need to get Microsoft Whiteboard. And there are different ways that we can work with and use Microsoft Whiteboard. For example, if I go into a web browser, I can log in to my Microsoft 365 account. In my case, when I log into my Microsoft 365 account, I'm going to log in with a user called Bruce Wing. Bruce has logged in through this browser. Now, just in the background so you know, I'm logged into my computer with my account, my Frank account. I'm on my computer as Frank, and I've logged into the web browser as Bruce. When I go in, you'll see that I'm in my Microsoft 365 account. If I hit the Waffle icon, you can see that I have Microsoft Whiteboard showing up as one of my apps. Now, for this course, I'm assuming you're using either an educational account or a business account for Microsoft 365, and you'll have all the same features. Now, here, if I don't see Microsoft Whiteboard, if I click on Explore all of your apps, you should see it appear in there. So when I click on Microsoft Whiteboard, I've already opened up the tab. I will now see all of the Microsoft Whiteboards associated with the Bruce Wayne account. And I could go in here. I could open up an existing whiteboard. This is one that has nothing on it. And don't worry about some of the things that you may be seeing. We'll be exploring all of these. If I go in here, I now have the Microsoft Whiteboard, and I can now go in, and I can now start working with the Microsoft Whiteboard. If I have a stylus and a touchscreen, I can work with that as well. And I'm going to talk about that again in an upcoming lesson. The point here is that I'm using a web interface to get to the Microsoft Whiteboard, and I'm able to work and share and do all sorts of things with the Microsoft Whiteboard. There are some limitations to the web interface whiteboard, as well as the one that we get with Microsoft Teams. The one that I'm going to be predominantly using in this course is going to be the one that we download from the Microsoft store. So if you're on a Windows computer, you can go into the Microsoft Store. You can go and search for Microsoft Whiteboard, and you'll have a button here that says G. If it's already installed, you'll have a button that says open. Now, when you open up the Whiteboard on the computer, it will automatically connect to the whiteboard of the user logged in to the computer. Now, most of the time, if you're logged into your computer as Bob and you open up your web browser, you'll log into resources as Bob. You'll keep one account throughout. But I wanted to show you that it is important to note that whatever account you're logged into the computer with will be associated with the Microsoft whiteboards of that user. And if you are, say, using a company computer and you're logged in with a generic user, when you log in using your Microsoft 365 account, you will actually get access to the whiteboards you've created under that account. That can be very handy, especially if you're a mobile trainer or a teacher that moves from classroom to classroom, and you might be using a generic computer. Here again, I can go in. I can have a new whiteboard here. And even though it looks exactly the same, it actually is a little bit more feature rich. It has more to it than the whiteboard that I might have through a web interface. I won't show you the Team's whiteboard. I'll show you that in a later module. But for now, what I'd like you to do is I'd like you to go onto your computer, log in, and then go to the Microsoft Store, search up Microsoft Whiteboard, download, and let it install on your computer so that you can follow along with all of the other lessons, like the one we have next. 4. Looking around - the Whiteboard Interface: After we've launched the Whiteboard application, we're faced with a large whiteboard. But there are different sections to the whiteboard that are worth getting familiar with because it'll help us navigate. And we'll go into each of these sections in a lot of depth. But let's just take a nice overview of the whiteboard here. The first thing that we have is we have our little hole icon. When we go to our home icon, this will show us all of the different whiteboards that we have access to with the account that we're using. You'll notice that this account is my Bruce Wayne account, and you'll notice a few things with these whiteboards. First, I have the ability to create a new whiteboard, and then you'll see some whiteboards have a small icon which indicates that these are whiteboards that I've shared or I'm working with maybe in a team's environment. You'll notice that I have some whiteboards that do not have this small blue icon, and those are whiteboards that I've created here on this system. I can still share them and I'll show you how to do that later. But it is important to note that with some shared whiteboards, I don't have any further control of them. Whereas with these whiteboards that are not shared through a teams meeting, I have a small ellipse. This is going to allow me to do things like delete and rename the whiteboard, and I'll show you later on how I can copy and make multiple copies of a whiteboard, creating my own templates in a future lesson. Let's go into this whiteboard, the bat cave whiteboard. And when it launches, you'll see that I have a template screen comes up. We'll be exploring templates in another lesson as well. But if I don't want to see templates when they come up, I can clear this checkbox, and now when I launch a whiteboard, I won't see templates each time. I'm going to go ahead and close that, and we can always get that back. When we look at the template lesson, we'll look at that. So here's my environment. Now, it is a lot easier to work with a whiteboard if you have a stylus or a tablet or a surface. We'll talk about that in the hardware lesson. But for now, you'll see that I have a section up here where the home button was. If I see the name of the whiteboard, is Bat Cave. It's a simple drop down to rename the whiteboard here so I can just type in a new name for the whiteboard. This section here is the control center or the settings of the whiteboard. And down here you can see I have the pens of the whiteboard, and down here you can see I have some controls of how much of the whiteboard is going to be shown at any given time. Let's take a look at each of these areas of the whiteboards throughout the next lessons. 5. Important Whiteboard Settings: First thing that people want to do when they install Microsoft Whiteboard is grab a digital pen and start scribbling all over the whiteboard. And we're going to do that. But it's worth taking a few moments to look at the settings menu and get the environment ready for us in order to have the most productive experience with the Whiteboard. Now, we're going to take a look at the settings menu, including one setting that a lot of people do not know about, but it adds a huge amount of functionality to the Microsoft Whiteboard, and in fact, it's probably one of the most important settings that I think you can put onto the Microsoft Whiteboard to make sure it's an effective tool. Now as we go into the settings, I'm going to show you the different settings. And then in some subsequent lessons, we're going to take a look at going into depth with some of these. But let's take a general overview of the settings here. If I go up to this little gear icon, you'll notice I could create a new whiteboard, open an existing whiteboard. But if I go to the gear icon, I will get a small set of settings that I can put into play. For example, I can enhance an ink shape. That means if I draw a circle, it looks like a circle, triangle is a triangle, so on and so forth. I can get help on the Microsoft Whiteboard. I can send feedback about the Microsoft Whiteboard, and I can just get the general information of what version I'm running and such. But here's a critical critical setting. And a lot of people do not know about this setting, but now you're going to know about it, it's going to be amazing. Well, going to privacy and security, there is a setting here to enable optional connected experiences. This is going to really allow me to do some things with a whiteboard that generally are locked out by default, such as cutting and pasting into the whiteboard. Super use. If you remember the lesson that we had on why the Microsoft Whiteboard is such a good tool for teaching, this is one of the things that we can enable to make it an even more effective tool. Now it is possible that that will be great out for you and you can't change that. If that's the case, then what's happened is your IT department has not enabled the optional connected experiences for your Microsoft 365 account. So you'll definitely want to contact them with a help request saying that you want optional connected experiences turned on so that you can use the Microsoft Whiteboard in order to cut and paste into the whiteboards. Now, we'll close this one down and we'll go into a whiteboard and we'll have a settings menu here as well with a few more options. So again, we have the gear, and you can see that the enhanced ink shaped toggle switch is there as well. And we also have something now called collaborative cursors. When we do the lesson where we're going to share the whiteboard and have multiple people working on the whiteboard at once, you'll see that by enabling the collaborative cursors, we're going to be able to see the icons of everybody who's participating in the Whiteboard. So in my case, you can see my icon is a little bat symbol, so I will have that floating around as I move around the environment. If I don't put a symbol for my account, then it'll just be my initials, but I'll be able to see who's working on the whiteboard. That's an upcoming lesson. Underneath authors, we can also toggle this on, and this is going to have attribution for objects created on the whiteboard. Again, in a shared environment where we're brainstorming and such, maybe we're not working synchronously. We're working asynchronously, so I'm doing something and one evening, you're doing something another evening and we want to have one big whiteboard where we're brainstorming, that authorship will show up on the objects that we create. Again, something we're going to see when we do the collaboration lesson. We can also go in and I'll skip this format background for a moment because it's very cool. We get the help, send feedback about Whiteboard, and again, the privacy and security where I can enable the optional experiences. Now, you do not need to enable it again and again for every whiteboard. It's a global setting. So once you've enabled the connected experiences, it'll apply to all of your whiteboards. Let's take a look at the format background because it's a very useful feature. A great example is I've had people say to me, I want to teach a math class, and I need a grid environment. There you go. You can just go ahead and put the gridded environment as your background. And this is great for drafting, for any type of mathematics, anything where you need to put things into a more precise location. If you want to have dots, which will also help act as guides, maybe for drawing and such, that's very useful. And you can even do, wide rule lines. So if you're doing handwriting and such, that can be very useful. Now I'm going to go in, as well. I can change the background color. So here you can see I have lined yellow padded paper. So you can see that by using the background, I can get the exact environment that's most applicable to what it is that I'm trying to teach. And format background will also be the subject of our pro tip coming up next. We're going to go back, though, to the settings that we have here, and you'll notice that there's a few other options along the setting. So one of the things that we can do with the Whiteboard is we can share the Whiteboard. This is where I can invite others to come in and collaborate on the Whiteboard. So when I go into the sharing menu, I can select people from my organization organization and invite them to come in and work on this whiteboard with me. So I could add people from the organization, put a message out to them. Hey, come join me on this brainstorming whiteboard that we have. And I can copy the link, and I can send that to them, as well. We can also go into some settings here in terms of people that will be allowed to come in. I can have people that are within my organization, people that have existing access if they're there, and people that I choose. I can go in. I can also choose whether they can view the whiteboard or edit the whiteboard. This is another one of those settings that's really important because if I want to collaborate, then I want them to be able to edit the whiteboard. If I just want them to see my work, then I want them to be able to view the whiteboard. I can go in there and I could apply that setting. But in my case, I won't share it at the moment. We're going to do a whole section on sharing and collaboration. Speaking of sharing and collaboration, we have a follow me option. Now, what the follow me option will do is any participants in the Whiteboard are now going to follow me as I move around the canvas. I haven't shared it with anyone, so nobody is following me at the moment, but we'll see later on that as I move the Whiteboard around, if others have joined in through Microsoft Teams or through a shared whiteboard, then they're going to see me as I move around. That's a very useful tool, and I can stop the follow as well. There's also a nice little timer here. Let's say, for example, I want to give 10 minutes for the class to do an activity or something. I can just start this timer. I'll start up and then they're projected on the screen or on the computer, if they're connected to the whiteboard, they'll see how long it is that they have to participate. I can pause that if I want to provide additional instructions and I can go in and I can actually reset it to the five minute default if I like as well. So you can see that this settings menu is going to create the environment that I need in order to get the most out of Microsoft Whiteboard. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to get that connected experience there, to really do a lot of the things that kind of make the Microsoft Whiteboard even more useful. If you cannot use the connected experiences and your IT department will not enable them, there are some workarounds and ways that we can work with it, but it does really enhance the experience by allowing us to do things like cut and paste. And I'll show you a lot of the collaboration in the collaboration lesson. Let's move on to the next lesson, which is a pro tip of something I can do with the settings menu, again, that a lot of people don't know about, but you're going to know about, and it's a real game changer. 6. PRO TIP - Making a Blackboard: A quick pro tip for Microsoft Whiteboard. If I take the Microsoft Whiteboard, go into settings, format the background, I can turn it into a Blackboard. Then I'll go into my pens. I'll choose one of my pens and make it a white pen, and now I have a traditional Blackboard environment instead of the whiteboard environment. You can even use different colored pens on here. We're going to take a look at the pen menu in the next lesson, but we can change our whiteboard into a Blackboard and create a little bit of variety for our students and our audience when we're using the tool. 7. All about the pens (and ruler... and more!): Looked at why the whiteboard can be a useful tool for teaching. We also had to look at how we could set it up to make sure it works well for us. Now it's time for us to actually start doing something with the whiteboard and using the pens on the surface. If I look here, you'll notice at the bottom, I have a pen menu and I have the select menu, which is represented by the mouse cursor. But if I go into my pen menu, you'll see that I have three pens, a highlight, a laser pointer, an eraser, a ruler, and a lasso. All of these are used to work and interact with the whiteboard, and let's grab a pen to begin with. Now, when I click and tap the pen, I'll have a choice of changing the color of the pen. I'll have the ability to change the thickness of the line of the pen, as well as the opacity of the line. Down here at the bottom, I can put an arrowhead on the end of the line that I draw or double arrowheads on both sides of the lines that I draw. I'm just going to choose a black pen and keep the default thickness of three and 100% opacity. Now if I go and do something like write on the whiteboard, you can see that it puts it onto the whiteboard and I've used my pen on the whiteboard. Now, if I go in, I could change the colors by hitting the plus symbol and choose any color that I wanted to use on the whiteboard. So basically any specific color, you basically have all of the color palette that you could want. You can see it both as a spectrum or as a grid, whatever you prefer. I can have up to three pens active at any one time, so easy access, you can grab as many pens and colors as you want. But let's say, for example, I want a pen that's a little bit of a lighter purple in here, and let's say that I want that pen to be a little bit thicker and maybe a little bit lighter, a little more opaque. So now I can put my purple line in here and you can see that that purple line is a little more opaque and it's a little bit thicker than the line that I have on the black pen. I'll go into this pen. I don't need a third purple pen, so I'll make that a blue pen on this one here, maybe I'll put an arrowhead. So when I draw the line, it puts an arrow on one side, or maybe I want to do a compare and contrast, so I can do this and it would put arrowheads on each end of the line. You can see there's a lot of flexibility with the pens and I can turn off the arrowheads if I want, as well. I can also use the highlighter. Now, just like the pen with the highlighter, I can go in and I can change the thickness of the highlighter and I have a full spectrum of colors that I can use for highlighting. Maybe I want to have a green highlighter in here and I could go in and then I could select any colors. Then if I wanted to highlight something, I could highlight it and you see that I've now highlighted. That's very useful. I also have my laser pointer. Now with the laser pointer, you do not get the spectrum of colors. There's a limited palette here of six colors that you can choose from. Most of the time I use a red laser pointer. The difference in the laser pointer and highlighting is that if I draw a circle with the laser pointer to draw attention to something, it fades away after a moment. That's great if I want to say, here's something you should pay attention to, but then I can have it fade away without keeping it on the whiteboard and cluttering everything. Of course, we all make mistakes, so we want to make sure that we have an eraser. Now with the eraser, if you go fast with the eraser, it grows in size. So you're able to go in and you're able to erase a larger area, or you can actually have a smaller precision eraser, if you want to just erase a small portion of the line that you're working on. The eraser, I can also configure it. If I want to by pressing down, I could have it so that it's a partial stroke eraser, or I could have it if I press down, that it erases the entire line all at once. So if you want to clean up a lot at once, you can make it an entire line eraser, and if you just want to erase a portion of what you've drawn on the whiteboard, you can use the partial stroke eraser. So you have an option between the two. Another very useful feature is the ruler. This is, of course, especially useful for anybody who's doing math or anything. If you use the ruler, you can move it around the surface, and if you go to the center of the ruler and then use the center wheel on your mouse, you can actually go in and you can change the angles there. You can also go in and you can drag the ruler wherever you might want it. Put it exactly in position, and then you take your pen and you can choose, say, a black pen here and put the ruler where you need it. Make sure you're outside of the ruler area, and then you can just draw a line, and then that becomes a line on the white board. And if you get rid of the ruler, the line remains. So that's a very useful feature as well, especially for anyone that needs more precision in what they're doing. And again, you can just scroll that center mouse wheel in order to put the ruler exactly where you would like. And then you could draw lines if you're doing maybe some sort of drafting or something and you want to draw some lines. If you go a little bit over, when we take the ruler away, I can then take my eraser and just clean up the end there. Make things quite nice here, and now I've got my line in there. And of course, if I had grid paper, that would be even easier to use. Now you might wonder, what's the use of the last sew here? Well, if I want to, I could choose objects. For example, I could go and choose everything on the surface here, and now I've connected it all together, and now I could move it around as one unit. I could also do things like just bring it down a little bit. I could do things like put a comment on the entire set. I could delete all of the objects that I've put into the Lasso. I could copy it if I want to make copies, and I could even put I can convert it into different shapes, and I could even go in and duplicate it or lock it on the screen. I find this quite useful if I'm teaching something and I want to make several copies and then annotate the different copies. Let me show you what I mean by that. So let's say, for example, that I created the whiteboard here, I want to clear it. So one of the ways I can clear the whiteboard is right click and go clear Canvas, and now I've cleared the canvas. Let's say I go back into my pens, and let's say I have three objects in here and I'm doing some sort of game where, tell me something that's squares, something that's a triangle, and something that's a circle. But I want to have this exercise through several students. I can go in and I can select all of those, choose the ellipse, duplicate it, and now what I can do is I now have a duplication of that. In fact, if I wanted to, I could make multiple copies. So now I'll grab everything here, duplicate that, move it over. And now you can see, I very quickly created an entire environment where I have four different little games that we could play. Name something that's a square, something that's a triangle, something that's a circle. That's a simple game, but you get the idea that I can create multiples of an object very rapidly by using the Lasso to select them, and then I'm able to go in and delete them all. Now, one of the things we can also do is down in the corner here, you can see that I'm at 100%. I could make this smaller, so I'm down at 33%. This is very useful when I'm using something like Lasso because I can grab everything and you can see I can duplicate that. Now I've really got a lot of this square here. Bring it back to 100%, and you can see I've got an entire game that I can play here. You'll also notice that as I'm grabbing the whiteboard with the mouse, I'm using the left mouse button here. I can move things, and that's because I'm on the select menu. The other thing I can do is hold the shift key, and that is going to allow me to then move the mouse while I'm using the shift key to move things around. I find using the shift key in the mouse movement to be quite handy for navigating the whiteboard as well. That's an example of using the pens, the highlighter, the laser pointer, the eraser, the ruler, and the last so as well as changing the Zoom value of how far I'm zoomed in. I can come up to 100%. I could zoom in very closely. So you can see I've zoomed in very closely here. I can also use this button here to fit everything onto the whiteboard that I've got on my screen. So it's an infinite canvas. So in order to fit everything, it automatically defaulted to 64% because that will fit all of the objects I've created on the whiteboard. So this is a fit all button. This is the percentage button, and you can see that I can select using the shift key or in select mode to move things around. Let's go to the next lesson where we'll explore some more of the pen menu or the control menu at the bottom of the whiteboard. 8. Sticky notes : Using sticky notes can be a very good way to brainstorm, organize ideas, share thoughts. And Microsoft Whiteboard has some really nice features when it comes to sticky notes. I can go into the Control Center here and choose sticky notes, and you'll notice that I could have individual sticky notes, or I could put an entire grid of sticky notes onto the whiteboard. Let's choose individual sticky notes, and I'm going to go with a classic yellow sticky note. Now, sticky notes can be a little bit tricky because if I choose my mouse and choose the yellow sticky note and click it, nothing happens. But then when I move my mouse, notice that my mouse icon is a sticky note. My cursor is a sticky note. I can go anywhere I want on the whiteboard, and when I click, then it will place the sticky note. If I'm using a stylus on a touchscreen or a tablet, then if I want a sticky note, let's say I want a blue one, I just tap it, and it automatically goes into the center of the whiteboard. It finds a spot for it. So it depends on whether you're using your mouse to add the sticky note or whether you're using a stylus to add the sticky note. So that's kind of a gotcha there as well. Now, if I go into a sticky note, the last sticky note that I created on this whiteboard was the blue one. So if I go over here, it will sit on top of the yellow one. The last sticky note that you put on the whiteboard is at the front layer of your whiteboard. I could choose my yellow sticky note, go into the ellipse, and I could bring it to the front, and now the yellow one will sit on top of the blue one. Speaking of the menu, you'll notice that I have a larger menu here. I have the pen menu. I can change the color of the sticky note. I could also change the text style, handwritten professional and simple. Those are the only different styles that you get. To you don't get a lot of different typography here, but I think handwritten professional and simple are fine fonts for me to go in and convey what I want on the sticky note. I could go in and when I type, let's say, I'm going to go with handwritten. Now when I type in here, I can say hello. And you can see it's that handwritten style font. I could, if I want to select what I've written, and I could make it bold, italicized or underlined, so I'll make it italicized. And there's some really neat features that I have here. For example, I could create a comment. If I choose to comment, I'll be Bruce Wayne because that's who I'm logged in as. And I might say something like great comment. And when I'm in this dialogue box, I can move my comment to wherever I want, and you can see that it now says great comment, and I can send that in, and you'll notice my comment will be attached to that sticky note. Again, if I go in and I move that sticky note around, my comment will stay with it. Now, you'll also notice something very subtle here. The menus changed. And the reason for that is I'm currently moving the entire sticky note, not just an element within the sticky note. If I then go into the sticky note by double clicking, you'll see I get the menu related to placing objects on the sticky note. So there's really two sticky note menus. There's the I want to deal with the entire sticky note menu. So here I want to deal with the entire sticky note, and I get some limited options here in terms of being able to do things like duplicate, lock it, you know, make a copy of it, add comments, or if I double click into the sticky note, then I can do things like change the color, and I can do a little bit more with the sticky note. I can also go to the ellipse here where I can delete it, copy it, and duplicate it. But I can also edit the alternate text for the sticky note. So that's good if you want to put text on visual images so that they are described. I can again, bring it to the front, send it to the back, or lock it into place. Another neat feature of the sticky notes is I can make reactions. So I could say, that's a great idea, give it a thumbs up. I could go in there and laugh at the sticky note, whatever the comment was. I can say I'm confused or puzzled about this. So I do get some limited reactions for the sticky note as well. Again, if I take the yellow one here, the yellow one is on top. So you can see that because it's the top layer, it covers up the one behind, and I'm going to put that back to blue so you can really see the contrast. And I could go in here. You can also write on the sticky note, but I'm going to show you something, so I'm going to grab the sticky note, grab the pen, and I'll just write hello on here. So now I've got two sticky notes. One of them has some comments on here. One of them just has hello written on there. Now, if I take this sticky note here, and I duplicate this sticky note, so I'm going to duplicate it. Notice it does not duplicate the word hello that I wrote on here. If I take this one where I've typed it and I duplicate this one, so I'm going to go in and I will duplicate that sticky note, notice my text gets duplicated. So this is a little bit of a gotcha when it comes to sticky notes. If I'm using my pen, stylus, it will stay with the sticky note but it is not considered an object that's going to be duplicated on the sticky note. So that is a little bit of a trick, if you would, that you have to be a bit cautious of. If you want to make a whole bunch of handwritten sticky notes, I would recommend maybe instead using typing. So use typing. Now, also notice that when it did copy the blue sticky note, it didn't copy the comment, and it didn't copy the reaction. The reason why it's also giving me the attribution here, just as a reminder from the settings, I'm in authors, and I'm showing attribution, right? So I'm showing authorship, so you can see that this great idea comment is by Bruce and I can see that he's commented on this particular sticky note. The reaction, notice that it is also attributed to Bruce Wayne, so this also has authorship or attribution. So if you have multiple people using the whiteboard at the same time and you want them all to share ideas, you can get multiple reactions. I'm going to clear the Canvas, so I'm going to right click and say clear Canvas. Now I've cleared my canvas. I'm going to go back into sticky notes, and this time, I'll do a grid of sticky notes. So I put in a grid of yellow sticky notes and notice that it's sized my canvas to 50% so that they can all fit on there. I can scroll in if I want to get a little bit more visibility here and I'm going to scroll out a little bit. So I'm just using my center mouse wheel. That allows me to change the percentage here. I could, if I wanted to click to a certain percent, use the plus minus, or I can use my center mouse wheel to scroll. I could add multiple notes on here. So if I want a three by three grid of sticky notes. And then what I could do is I could zoom in on a sticky note, so you can zoom in, and then I could create an object here, you know, type in something like Hello, and type in Idea. So grab the type here and type in Idea. And then I could scroll out, and you can see that I've got those sticky notes here, and I can move the sticky notes in and out of the grid, as well. So you can move them in and out of the grid as you'd like. And that's a great way to have this grid of sticky notes. And you can even title your grid ideas. So now my grid is contained as an object that I can work with, again with a menu here where I can go in and I can actually, again, duplicate it, bring it to front or back, and lock it. And we also have the ability to put the Alt text in there as well. So the grid can be treated as an object. Each individual sticky note can be treated as an object, and we can go and make all sorts of copies and work with sticky notes in the Microsoft Whiteboard. A very useful tool and something that I use all the time for sharing ideas, especially when we're collaborating, which will show you in an upcoming lesson. 9. Reactions : Great way to show how we're feeling about something is through a reaction. So here's an example where I have some logos that I put onto the whiteboard, and I want to collect people's reactions to these logos. Now, reactions can be used at any time. We could be using them on any different object on the whiteboard. But let's say, for example, I want to find out what people's reactions are to these three specific logos. Well, what I can do is go into the reaction menu here on my control. Now, with the reactions, I have a lot of different types of reactions. And, again, this is very important to understand whether you're using a stylus or whether you're using a mouse. In this case, here, it's a little bit better to use a mouse because I can choose the reaction I want. Let's say there's a logo that I don't like. When I use my mouse to click the reaction, I can then choose where I want to place. So that one there is a logo that I don't like quite as much. I could then go in and use my stylus, and I'll choose a logo that I do like. So I'll click the checkmark, but notice that it automatically just places it onto the whiteboard, so now I have to drag it to where I want it to be. And then maybe there is a logo that I really like, so I'll click the heart here and I'll say, I really love that logo. So you can see here that I've got my reactions in place, go back to my select menu. I got my reactions in place. I could even change the size of the reaction. So I really want to show that I love that one. I really think that one's okay. But this one here, well, that one there is an absolute no go for me. This is not an editorial on the logos. Actually like them all, but the idea is with reactions, I can really customize and let people know what I'm thinking about the different elements on the whiteboard. 10. Posting comments: Placing comments on a whiteboard is also a great way to communicate with others. You can see here that I've got a couple of comments that I placed on this compass here. Somebody else has come in here while I was gone. Oh, it was Frank came in and said, navigation skills are required. I could say good idea. So we can have a conversation about different elements that are on the whiteboard, as well. So you can see here that we're having a conversation. The original comment was made by Frank. Here's some comments I had. Now to place a new comment, if I just go down here to the word balloon, I can just click on comment. You can also do Alt C, and I can place the comment where I like. I can say this is West, and you can see here that I can place comments and enter into conversations and dialogues about the different objects that might be on my whiteboard. So this little comment bubble is a very useful tool, simple to use, but also very powerful to facilitate communication on specific elements and specific areas of the whiteboard. 11. Working with text: I'm trying to write something on the whiteboard and I use my mouse, it can sometimes be a little difficult for the audience to read what I've written, depending on how good I am with moving my mouse around. I might want to use a stylus, and I have another lesson coming up where we'll talk about some of the different hardware that I like to use with the whiteboard, including some really inexpensive options. And I'm going to go in and use that stylus, and I'm going to write. And that's a little bit better, but it still might not be that legible for my audience. And if I want to do a more formal whiteboard, that's not going to look too good. So what I can do is if I go down and choose my text option, I can place text on the whiteboard. And here I could type in using my keyboard and get a nice quality text on there that's very legible for people to read. I can also go into the text box, again, I'll put some more text on here, and I can do things like change the color of the text. So maybe I want to have some blue text here, and I can put in my blue text here. I can change the text if I like by highlighting it, and then I could go in and choose a different font. You do not have a large font library here. You basically have handwritten professional and simple. I do like the handwritten, so that can make it look a little bit less formal, and that's kind of nice. This is the simple option. And if I wanted to, I could also do a more formal option if I was doing maybe a whiteboard that I'm presenting in a business meeting, so you can see that I have different types of fonts that I can put in there. But that's about the limitation of the fonts that I have. I can change the colors in the fonts. If I want to, I could actually highlight the font here, and I could make it bold. I could italicize it, I could underline it. Let's do all three. So I'll make it bold. I'll italicize it, and I'll underline it. And you can see that allows me to create that text there might be part of a board that I'm creating, and then I'm going to put some other objects on here. I can also make a comment on the text, so I could go in here and say, you know, Los pro now, this comment is going to be embedded into the text itself. So a lot of times, it might be when I'm working on the whiteboard that I'll place comments on there, that'll stay with the text. And then when I'm done, I can actually choose that comment, and I can actually go in and I can delete that comment or edit the comment. I'll delete it to clean it up. So you have that option as well. With the text, I can also go in, and I can choose whether it's going to be at the front or the back. I can set the layers as we saw with the notes. I can lock it in place. So now that's locked on the board. So if I move the board around, I can move this around. But if I grab this one, notice it's locked in place. I can also go in and I can unlock. And then if I go in here, I could do things like copy it, delete it, duplicate it. So I have a lot of different choices there as well. And this is a great way if I'm pre planning a whiteboard to set up different areas. I actually use this a lot when I'm creating a whiteboard template, which again, I'll show you in another lesson. But text can be a very powerful thing on the whiteboard, and having the keyboard and the ability to add text can make it a lot cleaner than handwritten 12. Shaping things up: We saw in a previous lesson, if I go into my settings, you'll notice that I have enhanced ink shapes as an option, meaning that if I was to draw a triangle or a circle or a square on the white board, those shapes would be enhanced and they would look a lot better. But I can do even better with shapes if I want to do a little bit more. If I go down to my control menu here and choose shapes, I can do things like add a triangle to the board. I can do things like add a circle to the board, and I could add things like add a square to the board. Now, you'll notice that this square came in quite small. I can just make it larger if I like, so I can adjust the size of the different objects that I have. As I move the objects around, you'll notice I have guidelines here that will tell me where they're lined up with each other, maybe make that square just a little bit bigger. So you can play around with those. Let's grab the triangle as an example. Could go in here and I could just call this TRI for triangle, or if I wanted to, I could type in the entire word. It'll word wrap so I can actually expand and shrink the triangle to fit the word in there. If I go into the triangle, I get all of the same options that I had with the text dialog that I had before in the previous lesson, handwritten professional simple. I can do things like I can have it at the front, back, different layers, Alt text, all of the things that we've seen with notes that we've seen with all of the different objects that we put onto the whiteboard. Now, one of the things that I can do that's a bit different with the shapes is I have this circle here where I can go in and I'll just move my triangle down a little bit, and I'll grab that again. I can go in and change the border of the shape. So let's say, for example, I have this blue triangle here and I want the border on it to be yellow. So I can create that border on there. And if I change the color of the shape, let's make actually the shape itself a purple. You can see here that all the shapes change to purple. So now if I grab another shape, I've now sort of invoked the purplness of shapes, and if I go in, so whatever the last color that I chose will be the color for the next object that I put onto the board. And then, again, I'll just show you quickly if I go in here and say, let's move this to the front, this now sits on top of the other shapes. And this would do this anyways because it is the last shape that I put on the board, but you can control the layers by going into the layering. Now, the triangle is going to be the one that I use for the next demonstration here because, you know, a circle is a circle, no matter which way it's facing. A square you can move a little bit, you know, the square on its side, you can move, as well. If I go here and I go to the corner, you sometimes have to fiddle it a little bit and you can see that I can actually grab the corner and I can move that shape. So if I want to move that shape, that's especially handy with the arrow shape. So if I have an arrow shape and I want to point to something on the whiteboard, what I can do and let's move these out of the way is I can actually go to the corner here just off the sizing button, and I can put that arrow exactly where I want. And one of the nice things here is you'll notice the text in here. So I'll just put text in here. Notice that the text will retain a readable orientation. So you can see it's hello facing from left to right, and then soon as I get over, now it's going from right to left. So that can be a very handy way of making sure that all your labeling and everything is working nicely, and I really like I like the arrow quite a bit. You can go in and you can make the arrow larger. Right? So you can make it a little bit larger and you can pull the arrow to make it a little bit longer, as well. So you have a lot of different options with your shapes, and I can use that to point to objects and put different shapes on the board. You also have some controls over lines and such. So let's say, for example, I wanted to put a line on the board, all I do is I select it, and then I drag it, and now I've got a line with a arrow at the end of it. I can go into the X there. That just closes down the shapes, and now I've got a really nice clean environment. If I want to go in here, I can duplicate it so you can see that I can just grab it. Uh, that's text. I can go in here, I can copy it, and I can right click and I can paste it in, and you can see that I can get multiple lines if I need them in there. This is really handy when I'm building up a whiteboard for a presentation, and I want to prepare it in advance. So I can make it exactly like I like it. And then we could come in and we could have a conversation about different things. What do you think of this? What do you think of this? And it's really quite nice when I can put shapes and arrows and such onto the whiteboard in advance. 13. Even more options to look at: So far in this course, we've had a chance to look at the Microsoft Whiteboard and why it's such a great tool for teaching and communicating, collaborating, and building ideas. We also looked at some of the settings of the Microsoft Whiteboard, some of which we've used right away, and some that are going to become very important in some of the later lessons of this course. And we've also had a chance to look at the features of the Microsoft Whiteboard, how powerful it is, some of the things that we can do. And I hope that you're starting to think about how you're going to use the Microsoft Whiteboard in your own communication, in your own teaching. But we are not done yet. There are some other things that the Microsoft Whiteboard can do that just bring it to the next level again. And one of those features I like to call dot dot WOW, because it's hidden behind three little dots on the Microsoft Whiteboard. But there are six features that we're going to look at in this chapter where we're going to really extend our capability to use the Microsoft Whiteboard in a pretty exciting number of ways. Dots are located here at the bottom. It's called More Options, and there are six options in there at this time. They've added some over the past few months. We have templates, which are built in templates. We're going to look at those. We have images. Putting images on the whiteboard always makes it more visually appealing. We have documents, a huge feature where I can bring in Power Points and PDFs and put those on the whiteboard. We have loop components, a feature in Microsoft, where we can collaborate through a loop component across multiple different programs. That's pretty cool. We have videos, so you can embed all of my YouTube videos on can embed any other videos that you want to have on the whiteboard and to play on the Whiteboard as part of your collaboration. And we have links. So, of course, we can put different links to different resources on a whiteboard, which we could do in advance before we start teaching or as we're teaching and collaborating. Let's go and take a look at all six of these options in the dot dot WOW section of the Microsoft Whiteboard. 14. Built-in Templates Brainstorming to Games: The major strengths of the Microsoft Whiteboard is that it's a constructive tool. I can use it to build ideas. I can share ideas and show the process of building those ideas by adding elements to the Whiteboard as I go along. If I invite others to collaborate on the Whiteboard, then they can come and add elements to the Whiteboard, and we'll look at collaboration and sharing in some upcoming lessons. But sometimes we also want to start with elements already on the whiteboard as a starting point that we can then use to build and brainstorm and even play games. Well, the way that we can do this is by using templates. We're going to look at how we can create our own templates in a lesson coming up, but there's a lot of built in templates to the Microsoft Whiteboard that can really start conversations, start brainstorming sessions. To use the built in templates, if I go down to the ellipse at the bottom here and I go into templates, you'll see that I'm presented with a menu of a whole bunch of different templates. I can search for templates. There's some recommended templates, and then I can look at templates by category. By default, this is actually going to be shown for every new whiteboard that I create. I turned that off a little bit earlier, so now I can get back to it by using the ellipse and going into templates. And there are so many different categories in one of the ones that I like, for example, is a cause and effect diagram, sometimes known as a fishbone diagram. And I can go in and I can preview this template, and you can see, Okay, it gives me some information on it. And it's quite nice because when I say, I'm going to use the template, I can just move it to where I'd like it on the whiteboard, because, remember, I have an infinite canvas, so I could have multiple templates on here, but I'm going to paste it onto the whiteboard. And you'll notice a few things right away. First of all, there are some tips, and there's a description of the template. So if you're not familiar with it or if you need a refresher on it, you can look at that. And you'll also notice down here at the bottom that it put my screen or my whiteboard to 16%. That's in order to accommodate all of the elements of the template. And it's a little hard to read, so I could scroll in, and then I could use that and move things around as I needed to in order to get the template in place. I can choose all of the elements and move them around at once. I can choose individual elements, and I can also edit, of course, all of these elements as well. Sometimes I actually like to use templates on a larger interactive display. If I'm projecting this up to a room on a screen, then I have a lot of space, so I can zoom in, zoom out. Or if I'm using an interactive whiteboard, in my case, I have a Near Hub S 55 interactive whiteboard that I really like use ever I need a larger area to share the ideas. But you can go in and you can adjust your screen, and you can zoom in and zoom out. You can go into different elements, and you can adjust them as needed, and you can add text, and you can do all of the things that you would expect on the whiteboard. But now you can see that I've begun that process by having this pre built template. I'll just move that over a bit. I have this prebuilt template to get me started. Now, I'll show you in another lesson coming up how we can actually create our own templates and then have copies of those as well. But for now, the built in templates gives me a great starting point with just many, many, many different templates that I can choose from, and this is a great way to start conversations and work with the Microsoft Whiteboard with prepopulated elements on it. 15. Images : Using photos and images and icons can really enhance the conversation that you're having with your audience, with your students. However, unless you're really talented, drawing with a mouse or even drawing on the board with a stylus can be a little bit challenging. You can get various results depending on your artistic ability. For myself, I really like importing images and having images that I can then make annotations. Also, if I have very complex images, if I have, say, technical diagrams, I can import them onto the Whiteboard, and then I can make annotations on those, erase the annotations and make more annotations. It's very, very useful. Let's say I want to put an image on the whiteboard, I'll just go to the ellipse at the bottom here and I'll go into images. I'm presented with two options. I can upload from my computer, which I'll show you in a moment. But I can also go out and search Bn images for all sorts of different images that I might be interested in. There's a number of different categories that they'll suggest to me, but we're going on a hiking trip, so let's type in hiking. And I can search down and see if there are any images here that I want for my hiking trip. Notice here that I've chosen creative commons only. These are all images that I can use royalty free. I'll go ahead and put a clip on here and you can see that I now have an image on here. Notice also that my board goes to 50% to accommodate the size of the image. I'm just going to shrink it down a little bit, put my board up to 100%, and then I can have this image on here. What's nice about the image is that I can then go in and I can make annotations on the image. So I can say, multi use trail. So I can say that's a multi use trail. I can say sky, state the obvious in there. And when I move the image around, so if I go back to selection, when I move the image, all of my annotations stick with the image. If I was to resize the image, so I'll grab that and notice that even outside of the image, it recognizes that that was part of my annotation on there. I can take the entire element and I can resize it. That's very useful. Now, in an upcoming lesson, I'm going to talk about how we can prepare ourselves for using the whiteboard by downloading assets that we might want to use. I'll show you how that looks. If I go into images and I go to upload from my computer, it's going to open up my browser, my Internet Explorer, and you'll see that I actually have a folder I created called Hiking Club. And in the hiking club, I have a number of images, downloaded photos. I also have a number of different camping icons in here. So PNG files around camping. So let's say, for example, I want to insert this particular PNG file in there, I can put that file in there. Again, I can move the board. I can resize. I can bring the board up to 100%. So you can see I've got this icon in here and I can put that in there. I can do whatever I like, and we can have all sorts of, you know, conversations and visual appeal. If I go back into images again, I'll upload from my computer. This time when I upload from the computer, I'm going to go into my photos, I'll go back to my hiking club photo where I've prepared my whiteboard conversation. I'm going to choose this photo and you'll notice that there's an error that pops up. It's unable to insert the image because it has to be less than ten megs in size. If I go in, I could either resize that image or I could go in and choose another image that isn't as large. I'll choose this image here and that image will be inserted and now I have this image inserted. If I want to get rid of these images here, I can just quickly come in. I can use my lasso on there and I can go in and delete it, or I miss that one there, just go ahead and grab it. And delete it. That's something that I do quite a bit. If I need to move things around or get rid of elements, I'll just select them all, come back up to 100%. That's a little bit big, maybe I'll come back down to 60% or 66%. You can see I can always resize the banner image here. But I could make this as part of a presentation that I'm doing and I could make this the opening whiteboard that I have. I could save this whiteboard and we could start the camping trip this way. I can do all sorts of things like put text in here. We'll have a look at a more robust or planned out whiteboard experience, but you can see how easy it is to just go in, grab images of all sorts, both from Bing images that I can download, as well as from my own images that I may have downloaded and prepared in advance, and I can create really nice presentations that can excite my audience, get them involved in the presentation, and have a nice look to the presentation. However I want to organize things, I can bring out my artistic ability, make notations on here, and this is a tent and get my audience involved in working with the whiteboard. 16. PRO TIP - Copy and Paste Images: A pro tip for the Microsoft Whiteboard when working with images. Here I have a Microsoft Whiteboard, where I'm going to look at animals that live on land, animals that live in the water, and animals that live in both areas. Now, I have a bunch of images that I've downloaded of different animals. So I could go in and maybe grab the dolphin, select the dolphin, press Control C to copy the dolphin image, and then go to my whiteboard and press Control V to paste the dolphin onto the whiteboard. In this case, a dolphin lives in the water. Go back to my images here and maybe I will choose a bear. I'll go Control C to copy the bear image. I could, if I wanted to, right click on the whiteboard and paste or press the Control V, and I've now put the bear onto the land side of my whiteboard. Then I could choose an animal like the crab and I could do Control C to copy the crab, go over to my whiteboard, Control V to paste the crab, and our little crab likes to live in both the water and on land. And if you know anything about crabs, you know that if you see one crab, there's probably a whole bunch more around. Well, you've already copied it with Control C. So when you go onto your whiteboard, you can press Control V, and it'll paste the crab down. So you can actually go in. You can make a whole bunch Control V. You can paste a whole bunch of little crabs on here, and you can have a whole herd of crabs on your whiteboard. Can zoom out and you can get all those crabs to the size you want those icons to be. But this is a great way to populate a diagram. This is a great way to work with images using images and just Control C, Control V onto the whiteboard. It's a great way to populate individual images or as you saw, a whole collection of images. 17. PRO Tip - using the lasso : This pro tip, I'm going to show you how to use a feature that I don't think it's used as much as it should in the Microsoft Whiteboard, the Lasso. So here I have a Microsoft Whiteboard. I'm doing a sailboat retrospective here, and I've got a number of items on this whiteboard. We're going to talk about templates and images in some upcoming lessons, but I have this whiteboard, and what I've done here is I've created this two by three grid of notes. And I want to create a two by three grid of notes and put it next to the shark down here. Well, if I grab the last so and I select those six notes, so you just go in and select those six, I can hit the ellipse and I can duplicate them, and now I've created a quick way of grabbing an element of the screen and moving it to where I want it. Now I could always go in and choose all of those elements again. I'm choosing all of the elements there and I could change the color of those notes. So that's a way of doing them all at once. I could move over a little bit here, so I'll just grab my select button and move over maybe I'll grab the last so and I will now do the same thing. But this time, I'm going to include the shark. And now I could go in and duplicate this and I could move this over here, and I could have multiple conversations about, in this case, here some of the obstacles, and we could have different obstacles that are being faced by different team members. I could also go in and let's say I was writing on the board or let's say I had a larger area that I wanted to delete. Again, I could choose to select everything that I want to delete and I could hit the delete button or the trash can and clean up the whiteboard. So the Lasso is a very useful tool for selecting more than just one item or one type of item, making copies, deleting them, whatever I might want to do. The Lasso is your friend for a select of multiple objects at once. 18. Documents on the Whiteboard: We're teaching and training, we may have a lot of different documents that are in PDF format, and we may want to share those with our audience or work on them together with our audience, make annotations on them, show people how to complete worksheets, show people how to fill in forms. And we can bring them into the Microsoft Whiteboard and do just that. What I'm going to do is hit the ellipse here and go into documents. Now, when I go into documents, I can get them from my OneDrive, so I can upload those documents. Or what I can do is I can grab them directly from my device. So I'm going to grab it from my device, and I have a folder for the hiking club, and I have a document here hiking and camping. And when I go to import this document, Microsoft Whiteboard will see that it's a four page document, and I can choose select pages within that document, or maybe I can choose all of the pages in the document. And in my case, I'm just going to choose the first two pages of the document. So I'll grab the first two pages. So I'll grab two or four pages, and it imports them into the whiteboard. Now, each of these pages is actually a separate element within the whiteboard, so I can work with them separately, or I could, of course, work with them as a group. I'm going to go into my whiteboard and just zoom in on the first document here, and you can see that this is a hiking and camping guide. I could talk to my audience and I could say things like, as we're working or as we're going on our camping trip, we want to make sure that we provide you with the knowledge and the confidence in order to safely enjoy the trip. And I can then go in and say, What's the first thing that we want to provide you with? And they could put in knowledge. We could put that in together. Now, when I make changes to this form, if I scroll in and scroll out, notice those changes live with that page. They're on that page now. And if I'd like to, I could go in and I could erase everything off of the page as if I had a nice fresh new document. Then I could quiz them and say, Okay, what are two things that we want to do? And they could say, Oh, we want knowledge and confidence. So they could go in and we could work together on the form itself. If it's a worksheet, we could work together on the worksheet. That's very powerful. Now, the one thing is when I do go in to import documents, the only type of document that I can import is going to be a PDF document. You can see you in the hiking club, I only see the PDF documents, and if I try to select file type, the only option I get are PDF documents. I'm going to go ahead and clear off the Canvas and I'm going to bring in a PowerPoint presentation. So let's say I have a PowerPoint presentation, I would like to import this into the Whiteboard. Well, what I can do in PowerPoint is if I go to File, you can actually create a PDF of your PowerPoint. So when I go to save this as an Adobe PDF, it'll prompt me for a name, and I'm going to go hike near the ocean. So we're going to save that, and what PowerPoint is going to do is it's going to convert every slide into a PDF document. It's going to be a page in a PDF document. So now I've gone and I've initiated this conversion into a PDF document. You can see I'm using Adobe PDF. I'll just close this down, and I'll close down the PowerPoint as well or move it out of the way. Now I'm going to go into my documents here or in my whiteboard. I'm going to go into documents, and now you'll see that when I go into that hiking club folder, I'm going to have another document called Hiking by the Ocean, hiking Near the ocean. When I open it up, it'll be the exact same thing as I saw with the other document. I'll see how many slides or PDF pages that on the presentation, and I could choose all of them, or I could just choose some of them. So I'm going to choose the first four slides of the presentation that's been converted into a PDF, and then I'm going to choose those, and those will appear on my whiteboard. Then again, I can work with each slide or PDF page as a separate document so that could be handy for me. Then what I could do is I could actually zoom in and we could talk about the different documents, right? We could go in. I could make annotations on there, so I could say, you know, What is this incredible creature that's living in the ocean? And I could go here and put you can see this is just a template that I was using. But again, I can move this, and it stays with that PDF document, which is a PowerPoint slide. So that's a little bit of a trick of how to get a document that might not be a PDF format. Most programs will allow me to save or print that document into PDF format, which then allows me to import it into the Whiteboard. And that's how we can work with documents in the whiteboard. 19. Loop components: Microsoft Whiteboard also supports loop components. So in Microsoft 365, I can have these components, they're called loop components where I can put a component onto different Microsoft 365 applications, and people can interact with that component no matter which of the applications they're using. So, for example, if I go onto my Microsoft Whiteboard and choose Loop component, I'm going to choose a task list. So we're going to create a task list for the hike that we're going on, and I'm just going to pop that onto the Whiteboard. So the loop component will be built, it'll be created, but it's not being created on the whiteboard. It's being created on my OneDrive. It's being created on my SharePoint site. And you can see here I've got a loop component. It's got a name. I could add a title to it. And if I look here at the loop component and click this hyperlink, it'll actually take to the browser for my Share Point site, and you can see small components so I can stay in sync. It gives me a little bit of a list of what are some of the things that I can do with Loop. It's a very useful tool and you can see here now that I've got op Loop Task list, and Loop task list. If I go and add the title here on the browser, so hiking supplies. You can see that the exact same thing that I'm typing on the browser appears on the whiteboard, and vice versa, if I go to the whiteboard and say we need to get boots, I can put that on there. I can even assign it to a specific person, and I can choose a date for it. So let's pop into today's date. And you can see all of that will show up on the loop component that's in the browser. But beyond that, I can do even more. I could go into the loop component. You can rename it. By the way, right now, it's just called Loop task list two. I could go and call this hiking. So we could rename this to our hiking task list. So we'll call this. Hiking list or hiking tasks. So I'll put that in there. And now, you'll notice that the name changes not just here, but also it'll change on the whiteboard. So I've gone in and changed it here, and you can see my loop component here. I'll change. It might take a few moments to change the name. So underneath here, I've got the hiking task. And if I go into sharing, I can share it through a link. In another application. So, for example, I'll grab this link, and I can choose who can share it, so I can choose people to share it with. So all of these people would be able to come in and they would be able to work with it. So I've got the copy link. I'll go into Microsoft Teams and I'll start a new post, and maybe the post will be let's make a hiking list. Then what I'll do is I'll pop the loop component in here. I'll just paste in the link and I'll post that in there. You'll notice now I've got it on the whiteboard. I have it in the browser underneath where I can control it in my OneDrive and notice boots and the name hiking supplies is there, and I also need some food for the hike. Notice when I typed it in, it actually immediately went through in all three areas. I have food, food, and food in all three areas and I can assign a new task and I can say tens and notice that every area where the loop component is being used gets that update. So this is very useful within the whiteboard because I know that this component can be used elsewhere within my Microsoft 365 subscription. I can go in and do there's a few different components that I can put in here. There's tables and voting tables. And all of those, once I put them onto the whiteboard, can then be further extended and used throughout the entire Office 365 subscription and different Office or Microsoft 365 applications. So loop components are very useful and it's a neat way to be able to collaborate across multiple applications, not just one application. People can use whatever their preferred application is with that loop component embedded in it. 20. Adding videos directly on the Whiteboard: Ing a video to a Microsoft Whiteboard can be a really useful tool. You can use it to start a conversation, play a video, and then discuss it. You could use it to reinforce a concept. You could do it to enrich the learning. There's so many reasons why adding video and using that as part of your presentation and teaching can be a useful tool. Now, to embed it into a Microsoft Whiteboard, there are really two ways to do it. I'd like to say the hard way and the easy way. But both ways will work. Now, for this to work, by the way, you need to make sure that underneath settings, security and privacy, you have the embedded experiences turned on. So if I go into the ellipse here, I can choose to add a video. And when I go to add a video, it'll tell me the types of videos that I can add. And what I normally will do is because I like to add videos as they come up in conversation, like to have a notepad with all of the URLs of the different resources that I'm going to use for my whiteboard presentation. So here, I've got this outdoor apps video that I want to play for the class. So I can go in and I can copy this. So I'll copy the URL. And when I go into this dialogue box, I cannot right click and paste. I have to use Control V, and that will paste the video in, and then I can insert it into the whiteboard. So there we go. There's the video. And once the videos in there, I can play the video. This is actually from my YouTube channel, so we can have the video play. We can then have a discussion around it. But there is an easier way to embed a video. If I go to my notepad again and I grab a video URL, I can go in, grab the whole URL here. I can right click and I can copy. And now instead of using the ellipse to embed a video, I'm just going to right click on the Canvas, and I'm just going to go paste. And notice it embeds the video. In this case here, it's a little bit easier to bypass the ellipse and just paste the video URL directly onto the whiteboard. I'll play just like the other video, this video will play connect up to YouTube and start playing. Now, the other thing you can do is if you click the link here, that will open up a browser and play the video. If you want to put the videos on and just maybe have their thumbnails on there, but you'd rather play the video through a browser interface. You can do that as well. A lot of options when it comes to video, but it is important to decide whether you're going to pre build them and put them on the whiteboard or whether you're going to keep a list of URLs. I use Notepad and just paste them in as needed. 21. Links on the board : Inserting links on the Microsoft Whiteboard is actually very, very simple. So I've decided to make this video more interesting by bringing my cat blossom along. So to insert a link, all you need to do is have a link. So here you can see I've got some websites that I've decided to share on the Microsoft Whiteboard. I'm just going to go in. I'm going to copy one of the links, right click. Copy it, go to the whiteboard, right, click Paste, and it'll actually resolve that and give me a thumbnail of what that link is. So in this case, here, this is a link to the West Coast Trail Parks Canada. It's a hike. So I can also go in if I wanted to, and I could go into Links. It would ask me what the URL is. Again, you cannot right click, so I go Control V, I would put the same link in that I just had there, so you can see that the links are quite easy. Now, with Links, it will not I'll give me a preview of the webpage, but I cannot browse the page from there. Okay, buy blossom. But if I click on the Link, it'll take me out to a browser. So that's about the simplest thing we can do with a whiteboard, other than drawing on it, but it is a very useful tool, especially if I'm preparing my whiteboard in advance, and I want to have links to different things that I want to reference as I'm doing a lecture. 22. Behind the scenes - the file system: Common question with the Microsoft Whiteboard is where are they stored and is there a way that I can access them? That's what we're going to take a look at in this lesson. You'll notice that I have my whiteboard app opened here and you'll notice that I have several whiteboards underneath this account that I've created, and some of those whiteboards have little blue circles on them. Those are whiteboards that I'm part of, but that I don't own. So I will not have access to the underlying files for those whiteboards. But other whiteboards, like the sailboat planning session, Whiteboard for educators, the data overview whiteboard, those are my whiteboards, and I do have control over those files. Where are those files? They're in OneDrive. So if I go to my OneDrive and I can log in through a web interface, if I go into my files on OneDrive, you'll notice there's a folder called Whiteboards. Now, if you have a lot of different folders and such on your OneDrive, it may take a little bit for you to find it, but it's alphabetical, so it's underneath whiteboards. And when I click on that and open up that folder, notice that the whiteboards that appear on my app are all listed here underneath Whiteboards. There's a bit of a difference, though. Notice here that all of my whiteboards are arranged in chronological order in the order that I last opened them. But here on OneDrive, they're all listed in in alphabetical order, numerical alphabetical order. That is something that would be really nice to be able to toggle on and off here on the app. But for now, the app will be all chronological order, but if I want alphabetical order, if I'm looking for a whiteboard, I can actually go in and find it here. Now, another thing that I can do is actually launch a whiteboard directly from OneDrive. So let's say I want to open up the sailboat planning session, I can do things like I can rename it. I can move it around. I can make it a favorite. I can go in and share out that whiteboard. I can do things like I can again, make it a favorite in here. So there's lots of things I can do, but if I just click on it'll open it up in a web browser. So now I have the web interface to the whiteboard. I've been doing most of the lessons in this course all on the app, but we do have the web interface, which can come in very handy because I can make changes directly by going into OneDrive, selecting an alphabetical whiteboard from the list, and bringing it into OneDrive. Over here, I could go in and I could open up the same whiteboard, and this is actually pointing to the same file. In fact, if I go over here by the Shark, you'll notice that it sees that somebody is using their app to access this whiteboard, it's myself, Bruce Wayne. If I go to the whiteboard over here, go over by the palm tree, you'll notice that my name appears here. The app is telling me that somebody is currently on the Whiteboard using the web interface. It's me. It's Bruce Wayne on both sides. Although I'm not Bruce, I'm Frank, but you know. Ways my account. You can see here that I have this. I can go into the whiteboards and I can do things like rearrange well, I could rename them and that would rearrange them. You also notice that I have a folder called components. In a previous lesson, I showed you how we could insert loop components into the whiteboard. That's where those loop components live. I have a couple of additional folders that I've created. We'll look at those in a future lesson. So we have this ability to work with the files of the Whiteboard. Now, we also can go and have OneDrive loaded onto my computer. So in my case, I have the OneDrive whiteboards synchronized with my computer. That's a OneDrive option. So when you go into your OneDrive and you set it up on your computer, you can choose which files are going to be synchronized, which ones are going to be downloaded. So in my case, I also have a copy of all of my whiteboards and my components and everything here on my local computer. And if you go here and double click, it will actually go in and it'll open up the Whiteboard file as well. But in this case, again, it'll invoke it through a web app. Microsoft Whiteboard prefers to launch as a web app, but again, I have the ability to go into my app, my downloaded Windows app here, and I can open up different whiteboards as well. If I go here, I'll just go back and close these whiteboards down. You can see I'm on my web app. You can see I have it in my file system, and this is going to open up a lot of possibilities for me to manage things. Notice that they are stored as a whiteboard file, so the extension is Whiteboard. That can be a little bit of a challenge because it is a proprietary format in a future lesson, I'll show you how we can actually take our whiteboard once we've finished with it and put it into a file format that's going to be a little more useful for us to share. But that's an upcoming lesson. Meanwhile, you can see the app, OneDrive, and my local copy of my O Drive all have my whiteboard files in there, and that's going to allow me to move on to the next lesson where I show you how we can use this to our advantage. 23. PRO TIP - How to manage files: A tip that can make working with the Microsoft Whiteboard a lot easier. Here I have my whiteboard app, and you can see all of the whiteboards that I own, as well as the ones that I'm a member of. Over here on my OneDrive, if I go into my whiteboard folder, I can see all of the whiteboards that I own. But if I have hundreds or dozens of whiteboards, it can be a little bit difficult to find the one that I'm looking for. Well, I can organize them into folders. So here I've created a Data Engineering folder on OneDrive, and here I've created a hiking club whiteboard folder on OneDrive, as well. Both of them are underneath the Whiteboards folder. So if I go into my compare and contrast and maybe my sailboat planning session, I can move those over to one of those folders. And these ones happen to be whiteboards that I'm using for planning a hike for my hiking club. So I'm going to pop those into the hiking club, move those over there, and now I have less whiteboards to deal with at the root of the folder. Maybe I have even more whiteboards that I want to do that with. Let's just scroll over here. So we'll go over here, and maybe I have my two data class whiteboards, so I'll scroll over, grab the two data class ones, and I'm going to move those as well. We're going to put those into the Data Engineering folder. So I'll pop those into the Data Engineering folder, and I'll move those there. Now, when I go to find whiteboards, they're going to be a lot easier to find because I have them organized in folders. As an extra bonus, when I go into the hiking club folder, notice that they're also in alphabetical order. So I have 01, and then I have sailboats, so numerical alphabetical order. And if I go into my data engineering ones, you can see I have those in numerical order, as well. Now you might say, well, if I'm over here on the app, I still don't see those white boards in the order that I want them. Well, what we can do is over here in OneDrive. If I want to use them in the app, I can go into the hiking one. I'll go into my sailboat planning session, and you can see that this here will open the whiteboard, so I can confirm that that's the one that I want to work with. So it'll open up that whiteboard. Make sure that it's the one that I need to use for my class or for my session, so you can see it's in there. Then if I go over to the app and hit the F five key, it'll refresh it and the last whiteboard that I opened on my account will have been that sailboat planning session, and that will be the one that shows as the most recent whiteboard to use. 24. Your own custom templates: Thing that's quite common is you might create a whiteboard that you want to use to start a discussion. You're going to write all over the whiteboard. You're going to move things around, add elements to it, do all the cool things that you've learned in this course so far. But then you want to be able to use that initial whiteboard as a template for another session, another discussion, another class. So you can see here that in the Whiteboard app, I've created four new whiteboards. I've created database concepts, data architecture, destination maps, and hiking equipment. What I want to do is I want to use these whiteboards that I've created as the starting point for a discussion. So what I want to do is go into my OneDrive, and I can do this either through the web interface or if I have OneDrive synchronized with my computer on my computer file system. And when I go into whiteboards, I'm going to create some new folders. So I'm going to create a new folder, and maybe this will be the name of my class. So this is going to be database concepts, and I'm going to have a class called database Concepts. And underneath the database concepts, I can even change the color of the folder, so maybe we'll make it gray for databases, and I'll create that folder. So now you can see I have my database concepts. And now I'm going to take my data architecture and my database concepts whiteboard, and I'm going to instead of moving them to that folder, although I certainly could, I'm going to go in and I'm going to copy them to that folder. So I'm going to make copies of those whiteboards, and I'm going to put them into the database concepts. And now I have those whiteboards as copies in the database concepts folder. I still have them here at my root, and of course, I could move them around. And maybe what I want to do here is I could even go into this folder here and I could rename them, so I could rename them and maybe put them as template files. A lot of times I'll put template or I'll put a dash. Underscore is better for me. Underscore. Underscore template. And that way I can see that this is a template for this particular course. Then what I can do is I'll go into it. So this is the data architecture. So I'll go into data architecture, and maybe then I'll start my lecture and we'll use the whiteboard either in person or remotely. I'll go in. I'll make a bunch of changes on here. I'll say this is this and that's that and whatever I'm going to do with the whiteboard, I'm just marking this up so that we have something in place. And now I'm done with this whiteboard and I no longer want it. So what I can now do with the data architectures that I've made all the changes to is class is over. I can delete that whiteboard, and now data architectures is gone. But I can take on my one drive my template for data architectures, and I can make a copy of it and move that back to the root of the whiteboard. Now when I move that back to my files over to the whiteboards, I can copy it in there. So now the templates in there if I go to whiteboards, and now it's no longer the template because that's stored in this folder. So underneath here, I can make sure that I take this template and maybe I want to rename it to something like Session two. This is my second session. Session two of data architectures, rename it, and now I have that whiteboard. I can go and again, it's going to be alphabetical. I can look at the whiteboard online. You can see here that this whiteboard is going to have none of my scribbles on it. That's what I wanted. I'll go back to my app, hit F five to refresh, and now my data architectures is going to be the copy that I brought in and renamed and you can see that when I open the whiteboard, I now can use this for my second session. So that's a great way to move and copy whiteboards and rename them in order to use them as templates. And then, of course, here in OneDrive, one of the things that I want to do is make sure that these folders or anything in this folder is marked as a template, so I know that I'm never going to open or use those whiteboards by mistake. And I want to make sure that I'm always copying and not moving so that I always have copies of my clean conversation or class starter whiteboards. So that's how we can make our own template files in Microsoft Whiteboard. 25. Copy boards between accounts: This lesson, we're going to take a look at something that might seem very advanced. But because you now understand the Whiteboard file system, for you, it's going to be easy, but it's going to be very impressive for others. We're going to take a whiteboard that's owned by one account, and we're going to give it to another account. So this means that I could go in and create a bunch of Whiteboard templates, and then I could give those to other accounts that need to use the same template. So you can see that I have four windows that I'm logged into. One in the top corner is the Whiteboard app. I'm logged in as Bruce Wayne. Below it is a browser. I've logged into my OneDrive as Bruce Wayne. Over on the side at the bottom corner, I've opened up the file system on my computer, which is connected to my OneDrive as Bruce Wayne. And at the top, I'm connected to a OneDrive that is not Bruce Wayne. So we have Bruce Wayne, Bruce Wayne, Bruce Wayne, not Bruce Wayne. Now, you'll notice that the account that's not Bruce Wayne does have some whiteboards in here, quite a few actually. If I go to this 1006 ETL, I right click on here and I'm going to copy this whiteboard. Now I've just copied that whiteboard. I'm going to go into the file system. I'm going to write click and I'm going to paste that whiteboard. So this means that the whiteboard files can be copied and pasted from one directory to another. Now that I put it into this directory, if I go to my browser, you'll notice that it shows up in the browser. And if I open it in the browser, you'll notice that the whiteboard that was created by this other account. Is now here and available on the Bruce Wayne account. And in fact, it's a copy of the whiteboard that Bruce now owns. Takes a little while, and it's a pretty complex diagram. So this is a course that I was teaching on extract transform load of data. We won't worry about what's on the whiteboard, but you can see it's got a lot to it. And if I go over to my whiteboard app and I hit the F five key, because I opened it up on my browser, that's the last whiteboard that the Bruce account opened, and you can see here that in the app, I also have the whiteboard here, and you can see I have the same whiteboard. I'll open up in a moment. When you look at this whiteboard, it looks like I'm sharing it, and in fact, I'm sharing it with myself here. So if I move around, you can see, as I move between the two, it shows Bruce Wayne. But if I go back to the whiteboard home, you'll notice that there's no blue icon indicating that it was shared with me. Rather, it was copied and pasted into my account. This is very powerful because I could make a whole bunch of Whiteboard starters for different classes, and then I could take the files that are generated, send them over to different colleagues that also want to have the exact same whiteboard as a starter, and then they could just put it into their whiteboard directory. It'll synchronize with their Whiteboard account, and they can use the Whiteboard app or the Whiteboard browser in order to open that whiteboard and start working with it. It's a cool thing you can do that not a lot of people know about, but you do because you're taking this course and you understand the whiteboard file system. 26. Secrets of planning ahead: Far in this course, we've been looking at the Microsoft Whiteboard and the way that we can use it to create engaging and exciting and interactive experiences with our audience for better training, for better teaching, for better learning. And I hope that you've been playing around with a lot of the things you've been seeing. I hope you're becoming very comfortable with Microsoft Whiteboard and really seeing what a powerful tool it is. And there is more to be learned when we talk about collaboration and using it within other applications. But I wanted to take a few moments in this lesson to talk about preparing some materials in advance when I'm going to use the Microsoft Whiteboard. Unlike tools where I build a presentation and then just show the presentation, the whiteboard is intended to be something that's a little bit more dynamic. The dynamic nature of the Microsoft Whiteboard means that I can bring images and I can bring web clips and I can bring all sorts of elements into the whiteboard, but there is a bit of a delay if I have to go and search for them. This is how I like to prepare my whiteboard presentations in advance by having some resources available and, you know, sort of as I needed them. So I have them near me as opposed to having to always go out and search for them. And I'm going to show you a few websites that I like. I'm not affiliated with any of them, but I will link them in the text below this lesson so that you can go and you can find them for yourselves and decide if they're right for you. But there's something that I like to use in order to make for a smoother flow and a better whiteboard experience. Now, the first thing I'm going to do whenever I have a presentation coming up is I'm going to create a folder on my computer for the subject that I'm going to talk about. So you can see here that I've created a folder called Hiking Club. This folder already contains a number of resources, and this is what I'm going to build up in advance. I'm going to take the topic that I'm going to have a session on or a whiteboard session on, and I'm going to start populating it with things like all of the documents that I might need during that whiteboard session. I'm going to go in and put a notepad in here. So I'm going to have a notepad. I'm going to start collecting all of the different links that I might need for different websites or different videos that I need. And then what I'm going to do is go out on the Internet, and there's a website I like called Flat icon. And what it allows me to do is search for icon Packs. And you've seen me using these here in the videos that I've been creating here. So underneath icon Packs, I'm going to go in and I'm going to put in hiking. And it will give me a number of different icon packages that have a lot of different visuals for hiking. And I look in here. So here's hiking and camping. So when I go in here, you can see there's a preview of all the different icons that I have in here related to hiking and camping. You may recognize some of these, and then I can just download this pack. If I go back, you can see that if I was to go in and type in oceans, so I'll go into oceans and you can see here are some of the other icons that you've seen in some of the demonstrations that I've been doing in the previous lessons. So I think I grab World Ocean Day here. You know, here's Ocean with 50 different icons. So this is really handy if I want to just download these icons. And then what I'm going to do is put them all in this one folder, which is my hiking club folder. So you can see I've got icons for animals, I've got icons for camping, icons for hiking and camping, and the World Ocean Day icons. Come as a compressed file, and then I just extract them into this directory, so they're there for me. Then what I can do is bring in documents. I will go in and I will bring in different images that I want. So I use story blocks. So let's say here, rather than video, I will go into photos or vector graphics, and I'll go in here and I'll type in hiking. And this is because I have a subscription to this, but you might have as part of your institution or your school have access to royalty free photos or you can do a safe search, and you can look for anything that's free to use in your presentations. Although within the classroom, there are some limitations. You can check with your own copyright officers on that. But there's usually always free images you can use. Another website, actually, I'll bring it up right away is called Pexels. So you can go into the Pexels website, and they have all sorts of great free images in here as well. Super useful when we're in the educational space where we can get a bunch of free photos in here. So, again, I could go in here, and I could go into hiking and you can see that a number of differ hiking things will come in here. There's, Oh, they're giving me cookies, yum. So I will accept the cookies here and that'll track me. So I'll go in there. Anyways, but I'll go back to my royalty free ones here. I could go in and download a bunch of images. Once again, as I download them, I'll put them all into one central location. So what I'm going to do is when I open up my whiteboard for presenting, I'm going to either project that onto a screen or potentially I'm going to share that remotely. We'll look at how we do that in some lessons coming up. But I'm going to open up this folder and have it available with my whiteboard together. This is where a second screen can come in quite handy as well. All my documents are in here, any PDFs, for example, and then I have different videos. I'll go onto YouTube, for example. I'll see videos that might be useful. If I like the video, I'll go in and I'll grab the share of that video. When I share that video, I'll get a URL for that video. I can copy that URL, and then what I'll do is I'll put that URL into a notepad. This one here is backpacking tips. So I'll put that in backpacking tips, and then I'll put the URL in there. Now I've got a little library of resources that I can use while I'm presenting. Then when I open up my whiteboard here, if I go in and open up a new whiteboard, anything that might be in this directory, I'm going to be able to start using in the whiteboard. So if I'm sharing this whiteboard onto a screen, the directory will not be seen. So the screen, I'm just sharing the whiteboard onto a screen remotely or however I might be doing it and let's just grab the whiteboard. Grab the files here. Now if I want to go in, let's say I want to go into World's Ocean Day, you can see that I can see all the icons that I have. If you don't see the icons, I'll go in here the World Ocean Day. If you don't see the icons in here, then what you can do is you can go into your view menu, and underneath view, you can go in and say large icons or medium icons. I like the large icons better for my eyes. Then what I can do is I can just actually copy and paste or I can just drag right onto the whiteboard here. Now I you know, my icon there and I can say, Hey, everybody, let's talk about whales. Then we have a conversation about whales and my favorite animal in the ocean is actually an octopus. So we could talk about an octopus and why they're so cool and I could go on long ways for that. We could go in, again, by navigating this directory, what I can do is I can use that as a resource for different things that I might need. Let's say, for example, I go back to my drive here, I could grab this new URL that I have, I can copy it, right click and paste it, and that'll insert that video. So you can see that I'm not having to search well I'm presenting. I'm able to drag icons. I'm able to drag resources directly into the whiteboard, and then of course, use all of the features of the Whiteboard, as well. If I want to, I could even build this up as a template a bit before I present. But the planning ahead is a very valuable thing to do, and it'll make your Whiteboard presentations go just that much better. 27. Sharing is caring: Very useful feature when we're sharing the Microsoft Whiteboard is to use the follow me option. Now, what Follow Me does is it takes all of the participants that are tuned into your whiteboard, and anywhere you go on the whiteboard, they will follow along. So if I scroll and zoom on a section of this whiteboard, every participant will be following along, and what they see on their screen will be the same as what I'm seeing on my screen. Especially like using this when I'm in a classroom environment, in a training environment, and I've shared the whiteboard to the class so that everybody can have what's at the front of the room on their computer, on their device. But I have a very large whiteboard, and I'm going to be moving from area to area. Well, that could be something where I want to make sure that my audience is following along, that as I move through the different topics, that they are listening, they're seeing exactly what I'm seeing. I could zoom in on a specific note, for example, talk about that note, put the information in there, watch this. And they're going to see exactly what I see. And this allows them or prevents them from moving around the whiteboard and not seeing what I'm seeing, not seeing what I'm talking about. If I'm done with that and I want them to explore the whiteboard, I can just turn off the follow me feature. And then, even though I might be zoomed in, my audience now has the freedom to move around the whiteboard on their own. They can adjust things and look at different parts of the whiteboard. But as soon as I put the follow me back on, it'll automatically snap them back to where I am on the whiteboard and keep us all in sync. The follow me feature is a useful tool. You can turn that on and off as needed. 28. Collaboration with Follow-me: Microsoft Whiteboard can be used very similar to a traditional whiteboard. I can project it onto a screen or a wall in the front of the class, and then everything I'm presenting and drawing and adding can be seen by the students that are in the training center that are in the class, except, of course, I get all of the additional features that you wouldn't get with a traditional whiteboard. And that's one way of using the Microsoft Whiteboard. But I can go beyond I can share the Microsoft Whiteboard. So now I can have everything that I'm projecting onto the screen, and I can share the whiteboard with a link so that it appears on the device that the student might have in front of them. I use this all the time in my classroom because then what I'm able to do is if a student can't see the front of the classroom very well, I know that what I'm presenting on the whiteboard at the front of the class can be seen on the device in front of the student. When I share the whiteboard in that way, I'm sharing it for view only. And the students can see what's happening, but they're not going to participate and make changes. Now, I can have certain activities where I'll share a whiteboard and the students can participate. And that can be a lot of fun in the classroom, as well. You just have to manage that. And then there's the opportunity to share the whiteboard with the world. So I can create a link to the Whiteboard, and somebody that's at a geographic distance can use that link to connect to the same whiteboard that I'm connected to, either again for me to show them something, but a lot of times for collaboration. So I could have some ideas and I could be sharing them at my end, and they could be sharing their ideas at their all on the same whiteboard. And best of all, it's really easy to do. Now, we can also do a sharing of a whiteboard in applications like Microsoft Teams, but I'm going to show you that in another lesson. Here, I'm just going to show you how I can share a whiteboard from the whiteboard and how easy that actually is. So I'm going to go into this whiteboard here that I've got on a sailboat planning session, and I'm going to go to the Share icon up here at the button. And when I hit Share, it's going to give me a dialogue box, and I have some choices. First of all, I can choose who I want to share it with. So I'm going to choose Frank that would be myself. And I'm going to go in and choose what I can do. By default, you'll notice that Frank can only view the whiteboard. And that is the default because, again, if you're in a classroom environment, you might get some pranksters in there drawing on there. But again, that's classroom management, not whiteboard management. But I'm going to let Frank edit because we're going to collaborate on the hiking trip, and I'm going to say, you know, this is our planning session that we're going to do around our hiking trip. And then I have a couple of options. Again, I could either copy the link and embed that link in some sort of, you know, application, or I could message Frank with the link, whatever the case may be. Or what I can do is I can just click Invite. And when I click Invite, it's going to send an email to Frank, and then he can respond to that email by joining the whiteboard. When Frank gets the link, he'll have a link to the sailboat planning session, and that's in his email. So he can join it any time. So it could be something where I do some planning during the day, Frank joins at night and adds to the Whiteboard. But in this demo, I'm going to show you us working together on the Whiteboard. So Frank will click the link on his email. And when he clicks that link on the email, it's going to open up the Whiteboard on his computer. So now Frank has the whiteboard on his computer and I have the whiteboard on my computer. I'm just going to dismiss this dialogue box. And you'll notice that up in the corner here, I now have my icon, as well as Frank's icon and picture here as well. As I move around, Frank is actually going to see my name on the whiteboard that he's looking at. And if Frank moves around, I'm going to see his name on my whiteboard. So we can see each other moving around. This is pretty exciting when you have five or six or eight people all working on the same whiteboard. So let's say Frank goes in and he decides that he's going to maybe move a starfish. So he takes the starfish. You can see that Frank's moving the starfish, and then he lets the starfish go. Frank can do things like go in and make a comment on something, so he could say, maybe over at the starfish here, Frank is going to say, you know, we should move this here, and he can put that in as a comment. And then what I'm going to see is I'll see that comment pop up with Frank that Frank's made that comment in there, and it's a little tiny comment here. I'll have to zoom in a little bit. So if I zoom in on the whiteboard here, you can see that because, you know, it's quite a low Zoom ratio here, that that comments a little tiny comment by Frank, and I can reply back saying, Awesome. I like that starfish there. And then on Frank's end, if he zooms in, again, you can see that I'm down at 35%. So as you zoom in, those comments really work better when somewhere around the 90 to 100%, but I can go in there and you can see that Bruce has got that in there. And Frank's just going to go in and he can go in and he can center to that selection, or he can come in and zoom out a little bit, as well, move the whiteboard around on his computer to whatever works for him based upon how much of a computer screen he has, and I can do the same here. I can come in and I can you know, zoom in, zoom out, whatever might work for me so that I can see more or less of the whiteboard and zoom in on certain areas. So you can see that this is very useful. Now, the other thing that I can do is once we've had our planning session, I could go into the sharing icon again, and you can see that when I go into the sharing icon, it takes a few moments, but I can see that the whiteboard down here is shared with two people. You can see that I got access for two people, so I can manage that access. So let's say Frank, I decide is now only going to be able to view. Right now he can edit, but if I want to, I can actually change that so Frank can just view or I can actually remove direct access altogether. So I can add and remove people into the shared whiteboard, or I can change their permission from edit to view. And if I'm done with the whiteboard altogether, I can go into the whiteboard. Again, I can go into the managing of the permissions. I can actually just stop sharing it with everyone if I want. So you can see I've got the people, the groups, and the links to the Whiteboard, but I could just stop sharing it. And now that whiteboard is going to be unshared. So I've stopped sharing the whiteboard, and when Frank leaves the whiteboard on his end, you'll notice that the icon on my end disappears, and Frank's whiteboards. If he tries to go back into the sailing whiteboard, you'll notice that he no longer has access. So there's a great way that we can collaborate on whiteboards, that we can share ideas. And this can be done across geographic distance. In an upcoming lesson, I'll show you how we can do this within a teams meeting, but this is a great way to share a resource, the whiteboard, collaborate and share ideas with people. 29. Exporting a Whiteboard: Taken a look at how we can share the whiteboard, how we can have people follow us. But what about if I want to share the whiteboard as an image? I want to save the work we've done. This can be very useful if we worked on a whiteboard together. I don't necessarily want to share the whiteboard or keep it on my OneDrive, but I do want to create a copy. I could even use this if I wanted to print the whiteboard so that we could have a physical copy of the Whiteboard. Well, to do this, all I'll need to do is go into my settings menu. And choose the export option. And when you choose the export option, you can export the whiteboard as an image, or you can export it out as a PDF. You can even do a full export where it has all of the comments and everything as a JSON file, so you can have all the links and everything that you use there so that you can export it and then maybe import it into another application because that JSON file does contain the data of the comments and such. So that's a little bit interesting if we're doing data analysis on top of our whiteboard. So if you have a collaborative whiteboard with a lot of comments about things, we can actually extract the data. That's beyond the scope of this course. That's more business intelligence and data analysis. So we'll go ahead and we'll look at exporting as an image. Now, when I export as an image, I do get a couple of interesting options. I can do a standard image. That's going to be good if I'm going to email it around or distribute it in that manner, but I can also do a high resolution image. That might result in a larger size of file. If I have the network to support that, I can share that around. Or if I'm going to print it, I might want to go ahead and use the high resolution image instead. Once I export it, it'll export that image, and then what I'll be able to do is then take the image that's been exported. You can see I've got it here in my downloads folder. I now have my session as a PNG file. If I actually open that file, you'll see that I have Whiteboard, it'll open up with an application such as Microsoft whatever application I have that opens PNG files. So you can see here I've got my whiteboard in here, and then that can be further processed and further used as an image. So that's a great way to get your whiteboard out of the whiteboard environment and into an image, a PDF or even a JSON file. 30. Hardware suggestions: Microsoft Whiteboard is a surface that we can draw on. We can write on it. We can do all sorts of graphic things with the surface. And for many things when I'm importing images and such or typing text, the Microsoft Whiteboard works perfect with a keyboard and a mouse. However, as soon as I want to start drawing or doing any type of sketching or handwriting, the Microsoft Whiteboard becomes much better with a few little pieces of hardware. And that can really range depending on your budget and how much you're going to use the Microsoft Whiteboard. Here you may have seen me using a pen a lot of time or a stylus when I'm working on the whiteboard. The monitor in front of me is XP Pen Pro Artist 24 series, Interactive Display. So I've got a display, but my stylus also works on it. It's very similar to something that you might see from Microsoft, like a Surface Pro. When you have a Surface Pro, you can use a stylus with the surface, and that can work really well with the Microsoft Whiteboard. Of course, if we have a little bit of a lesser budget and we want to make sure that we still get the ability to work with a stylus, this is probably my favorite thing to have in my briefcase when I'm going and doing any type of training. This here is a little interactive tablet. And you can get one from XPPenn for around $50 or so. I really like this one here by Near Hub. Near Hub makes a really nice quality one. You just use a USB cable that comes with it and the stylus that comes with it. And then whenever you're on here, everything that you're putting on the stylus will show up on the whiteboard. It does take a little bit getting used to because you're going to have this to the side and the whiteboard in front of you. But just like a mouse, you'll get very used to the idea of having your hand on one side and the actual drawing that you're doing on the other. This one's nice. It could be both left and right handed, depending on whether you're left or right hand. And so this is what I really recommend for most people. This is economical. It's a Near Hub This is not the S 55. That's the S 55. This is a Near Hub tablet, and I'll put a link down below for it. And I'll talk about the Near Hub S 55 interactive display in another lesson. Thing, of course, you can use is an iPad. So an iPad Pro will come with a stylus, as well. So you've got your Apple Pencil. And then if you're using the whiteboard on here, your Apple pencil is a fantastic tool. So, again, if you have some of the equipment already, just use what you have. I wouldn't recommend using your phone. You can use your finger on your phone, but I haven't found that to be a very effective way to use the whiteboard. Far and away, what I recommend is start off with a tablet, a graphic tablet like the Near Hub one, and this would be a great place to start. And then if you're using Whiteboard all the time, if you're doing a ton of remote teaching, I do like the interactive displays because you get the big screen and you get the stylus where you can go and you can write directly on the whiteboard on the screen. So those are some of the hardware options that I've used with Microsoft Whiteboard, all of which work really well and all of which ones you can consider depending on your budget and exactly how much you think you're going to be using the Microsoft Whiteboard. 31. Using Whiteboard in Microsoft Teams: Many people, their first experience with the Microsoft Whiteboard is through Microsoft Teams, the platform that we use to communicate and collaborate all across the world. So if you look at Microsoft Teams, I'm in a Teams meeting. I'm here as Bruce and I have Frank that's joining me. And if I go into the share icon here, you'll notice that you can go to the Microsoft Whiteboard. When you click on Microsoft Whiteboard, you'll see all of the whiteboards that are part of your Whiteboard collection because it's part of the web app. Now, if I go here, that's the last whiteboard I was sharing. But here you can see I can select from whatever whiteboard that I'd like I can go in and I can start with the follow me feature, which I recommend, especially in a meeting where you're guiding somebody around the Whiteboard. So I'm going to go into the whiteboard here. You'll notice that as I go into the Whiteboard, it's shown for all of the participants. As I zoom in, all of the participants will zoom in with me. I can go in and I can put, say, a reaction in here, so I'll put a heart reaction in there, zoom in. I can have the other participants can come in. They could put a reaction in there. Maybe they'll put a checkmark so they can put a checkmark there. And this is a great way for us to collaborate. You'll notice that the settings, for example, the author collaboration cursors are here. We have the enhanced shapes. So all of the different features that we expect from the whiteboard are here for us. We also under privacy and security, have the connected experiences on here. So that means that we're going to be able to go in and add objects in here as well. So a lot of times, if I go into the import, I can bring in images and documents, different links, and especially loop components, which are very, very useful. Now, you can see here that underneath the pens, I have all of the things that I would expect. So all of my pen shapes are here as well. So if I want to go in and draw on the whiteboard, I can do something like that, and all my participants will see that. And this is a great way to collaborate using Microsoft Teams and using the Microsoft Whiteboard. What's even cooler about this is that once you're finished, this is part of your whiteboard collection, so you'll retain this in your One Drive. So this is all going to be saved in your One Drive. It all comes from your One Drive. One of the things that for some reason, people have always asked me about is when you want to stop sharing, you have to go to the top menu here. People look all over where they can see the stop sharing. Stop following means people won't follow you, but stop sharing means that you're no longer sharing the whiteboard. Now that's removed from the participants screens, and you can continue on with the rest of your meeting and go back and forth to the Whiteboard. And again, actually, if I go into share, it will go right back to where I left off as opposed to the menu of whiteboards. It'll go directly to the last whiteboard that we were sharing in this meeting. So that's handy if you want to go back and forth to and from a whiteboard during the meeting. You don't always have to select the whiteboard. It'll default to the one that was part of this meeting when you share it first time, whatever the whiteboard is, it'll be there for you. 32. Mac, iPads, iPhones and more: The other place you can run a Microsoft Whiteboard, which is kind of fun, kind of interesting are on IOS devices such as an iPhone or an iPad, as well as Android devices. In my case, I have a large Android device, a Near Hub S 55 interactive display. Let's take a look at how we can run the Microsoft Whiteboard on both of these devices. On an IOS device, I'll go to the app store. I'll search up for Microsoft Whiteboard or Whiteboard, and Microsoft Whiteboard will show up. I already have it installed, so I can go in and read the description of it, but I'll just open it up and I'll get the whiteboard. Now, because I'm logged in with my Bruce Wayne account, you'll see all my whiteboards are there, and I'm just going to open one that doesn't have anything on it. And I have the plus button at the bottom, which gives me my menu. There's quite a lot of the features there. I can insert a note, for example, I can type on the note. When I'm happy, I can hit the checkmark, so I can put that note into the whiteboard, move it around. I can go to the plus menu down at the bottom again. I can see things like put in different pens. Notice I don't have as many pens. That makes sense. But I do have a lot of colors, and I do have the ability to change the thickness of the pen. I'm writing with my finger. So on an iPad, I would use the pencil, so that's quite nice. I can go in and I can add a you don't see the color of the shapes here, but you can change the colors, so I can modify those as well. I can go in and put reactions onto the whiteboard. All of this is being captured on my One Drive, so this will be persistence. So if I open it up in another device, if I open it up on my computer, all of this will be on this whiteboard. And I can import documents. This would be from my whiteboard or even from some team sites that I'm a member of. And I can even put templates on but this is a very small screen to be putting templates on. So you can really use this as a mobile device to grab things such as photos. And so here's an example where I can grab from my photo library. I can take a photo. So here I have a book in the studio on Artificial Intelligence, and maybe there's a formula in this book that I want to share on the Whiteboard. I can go ahead and take a capture of that. I can then use that photo, and now I have that photo as part of the Whiteboard. And if I go in and I open this whiteboard on a computer or in a teams meeting, this will all still be there. I can go in and make annotations. It's not really great for annotations. Even if I move the highlighter up to a fairly thick amount, it's not really that thick. Plus, it has the auto shape on here, so it grabs the auto shape. So I'll just erase this off. Clean that up. But what I can do is I could use maybe the red pen, and I could do some underlining of this, and that'll allow me to go in and make some notes that'll be there when I use this in a lecture or any presentation. Can Zoom and see that it's quite good, and you can get some good resolution on there. The photo of the camera on an iPhone is quite nice. So there's all my different whiteboards there. I could delete them, do a little bit of management in here, but I'll be able to go in and share them, export them, put on collaborative cursors, and you actually get backgrounds and such. So there are quite a few of the features that you'd expect to see even on a larger whiteboard. Microsoft Whiteboard will also work on large interactive displays. In this case, a Near hub S 55, running the Android operating system or a version thereof. And you can see that there are some limitations. I'm not going to be able to use loop components, for example. If I start a new whiteboard here, I'll go in, and one of the things I really like with the interactive displays is that I can go in and use templates. Templates work really nicely on the interactive displays because there's a lot more screen here. So we've gone from our little tiny iPhone all the way up to a large 55 inch interactive display. And I can go in and I can use pens. I can change the thickness. I'll often change the thickness to make it a little bit thicker when I'm using interactive display. You can see this is not bad, but I might make this even a little bit thicker. And again, if I go in, you'll see that I could use some of the features. Not all of them are there. I can import photos and such. Again, I have the camera because this particular display does have a camera at the top. I can go in and I can insert links. So those will work. Using the Microsoft Whiteboard on your MAC is easy. You just have to open up a web browser connect up to your account. So in this case, I'm using Safari. That's the built in web browser for a MAC computer, and I've logged into whiteboard.office.com as Bruce Wayne. Let's open up one of the whiteboards, one of the ones we're familiar with at this point. And notice that I can zoom in, I can zoom out. I can do all sorts of things with the whiteboard, just as if I was working off any other computer with a web browser. One quick note in this video for this course, it's a little bit slower because I'm using remote control software to remote control my on my Mac itself, this is very fast. It's very responsive. So if you see a little bit of leg, that's not the Mac. That's the remote control software just for this video. But you can see that I can do all of the different things here on the Mac. I can go in. I can resize the whiteboard. I can go in and install different components. It's actually quite funny. If I go for images, I search Bing through the Mac, so I go in here and I could choose. Let's choose an Apple. I think that's quite appropriate. I'm using Bing images on my Mac to search for a picture of an apple. We'll put that into the whiteboard here. And now I have a nice little apple using my Mac in order to work with the Microsoft Whiteboard. All of the different features there are things like collaboration and such. So very useful, very handy, and a useful tool that you can it's really nice to be able to use the Microsoft Whiteboard across multiple devices because it is a web app. So it does work quite nicely on different devices. And then, of course, the device sort of determines what features may or may not be present, but the vast majority of features are present across all devices. It just depends to what extent. So, for example, on the iPhone, I had a few less styluses. I didn't have certain ruler, for example, whereas on the Android device, again, I didn't have the ruler. I didn't have certain features, but a lot of the features were there for me, and it becomes a very portable, as well as a useful tool in large display environments. So from the small to the large and everything in between, Microsoft Whiteboard is an app that'll work and help us communicate and have a lot of excitement in our presentations in an interactive, shared collaborative. 33. Hooray! New Skills for you!: Congratulations and thank you. Congratulations on completing this course. I hope you're excited about the Microsoft Whiteboard and all of the cool things you can do with it. I hope you're practicing the skills from this course and that you're going to use them in your teaching, your training, and collaboration. And thank you. I thank you and my Cat Blossom thanks you. Thank you for taking this course from me, and I really hope that you got a lot of value from it. I hope it's something that you'll share with your colleagues because the more people that we can get using effective tools like the Microsoft Whiteboard, the more effective we're going to be at helping people learn. So congratulations. Thank you, and we'll see you in the next course. Bye now.