Jamboard: A Tool for Making Learning Visible in the Online Classroom

Dave S. Knowlton, Professor, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

Research is clear on two broad points:  First, the role of peer-to-peer interaction is essential for propping up the quality of learning.  Second, learning becomes more substantive when students’ ideas and thoughts are made tangible.  The challenge for educators in online classrooms, then, is to find meaningful ways to prompt students to share their ideas with their peers and to make those ideas concrete. 

Indeed, the power of learning is found in the interactions and consideration of ideas once they are made tangible.  There is no magic way to create interactions and call for the idea of tangible ideas.  Any educator who starts by insisting on exact tools for achieving these educational aims is missing the point.  No one software is inherently better toward the goal of learning than another. 

With that said, I have found Google Jamboard to be a meaningful tool to use during real-time online meetings.  Jamboard is part of the Google Suite and can be accessed through tools found in your Gmail.

Jamboard can be used as a whiteboard for you, as the instructor, to write on and share images—notice the toolbar on the left-hand side of Jamboard with these and other options.  But, for the purposes of this article, let’s consider the use of Jamboard as a tool for making off-the-cuff thoughts concrete so that students can interact with each other.    

One advantage of Jamboard is the fact that it allows a sticky note type system where learners can create their own sticky note and pin it to Jamboard.  This converts Jamboard into a type of public space where rough drafts of ideas can be shared quickly and effortlessly.  The advantage of Jamboard’s sticky note metaphor is that it communicates to students that the ideas are rough in nature—they are a starting point for idea sharing and consideration, not an ending point.  Therefore, learners are less likely to over edit what they share.  After all, isn’t that how sticky notes are used in the real world?  They are small reminders that one can stick almost anywhere.

“I have found Google Jamboard to be a meaningful tool to use during real-time online meetings.  Jamboard is part of the Google Suite and can be accessed through tools found in your Gmail.”

I have used Jamboard to create the needed sharing of ideas and interaction with those ideas in many ways.  Consider the following possibilities:  In a meeting among K-12 students, a teacher could give a student two minutes to create a sticky note that addresses a prompt as simple as “share your largest take-away from the reading.” Once students have had an opportunity to share, the teacher can ask students to categorize the various “take away” points for a clearer snapshot of the students’ thinking.  This categorization is as easy as dragging the sticky notes across the whiteboard by clicking, holding, and dragging.

As another example, I have used Jamboard with corporate personnel in a strategic planning session.  I prepare the jamboard page with three “boxes,” one to represent each of three important tenets of the organization’s mission statement.  Then, I asked the participants in the session to create a sticky note of an action-oriented item that the organization needed to undertake to better fulfill each tenet.  After the participants added sticky notes, I asked them to discuss the priority of the various notes in each box that they had created.  In this example, the participants made their learning concrete and then interacted around those concrete thoughts.

I have provided two examples of using Jamboard to achieve interaction among learners and to make their hidden thoughts visible.  The use of Jamboard can be extended in a variety of ways to achieve these goals.