Online Whiteboard for Teaching: When to Skip Screen Sharing
Screen sharing shows students a finished thing. A whiteboard shows a thing being made, and for anything procedural the making is the lesson. That one difference decides which of the two you should open.
When should you use an online whiteboard for teaching instead of screen sharing?
Use an online whiteboard when the process is the content: solving an equation, parsing a sentence, sketching a circuit, correcting a student’s working in front of them. Use screen sharing when the thing already exists and everyone just needs to be looking at the same copy of it, like a PDF, a slide deck, or software you are demonstrating. If you catch yourself scribbling annotations on top of a shared screen, the lesson wanted a whiteboard.
A finished proof shows seven clean steps, and students reasonably conclude they should have got there in seven clean steps too. Watching you hesitate, cross something out and take a different route teaches the part that is actually hard, which is choosing what to try. None of that is visible in the artefact.
Writing also sets your pace. You cannot advance a whiteboard faster than your hand moves, which is roughly the speed a student can follow and copy, and the most common complaint about online lessons is that they went too fast.
Which lessons belong on a whiteboard and which belong on a slide?
Sort by whether anything is being built during the lesson. If the answer takes shape while students watch, it belongs on a canvas. If it is already complete and just needs to be read, share the screen and keep the whiteboard closed.
| Lesson moment | Better on | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Working through a maths problem | Whiteboard | The order of the steps is the thing being taught |
| Reading a text closely | Screen share | The text is fixed and everyone needs the same lines |
| Marking a student’s answer | Whiteboard | You need to write on their working, live |
| Demonstrating software | Screen share | The interface is the content |
| Brainstorming or mind mapping | Whiteboard | Ideas arrive out of order and need moving around |
| Showing a diagram you prepared | Screen share | Nothing is being built |
Plenty of lessons need both. In Sonacove the board opens as its own tab beside the screen share, so moving between them is a tab click rather than stopping one share and starting another.
How do you open a shared whiteboard in a Sonacove meeting?
Click Show whiteboard in the meeting toolbar, or open the plus menu in the tab bar and choose Open whiteboard. The board appears as a tab everyone in the meeting can see. The host opens it, not the students: a student who wants the board sends a request and you allow or decline it.
Four details are worth knowing before your first lesson. The board stays live for the whole meeting, so closing it, reopening it or switching tabs never loses your drawing. Every participant’s view opens framed on the same 1920 by 1080 region, so a diagram sits in the same place on a laptop and on a phone. Images you paste are locked automatically, so a student with the eraser cannot delete your reference photo. One board holds up to 25 people drawing at once, with a warning before the cap.
The canvas is Excalidraw, the MIT-licensed open source whiteboard, embedded rather than rebuilt, and the drawing syncs over the meeting’s existing connection instead of a separate service.
How do you manage a whole class on one canvas?
Pick one of three modes and tell the class which one you are in. Demonstration means only you draw, invited turns means one named student draws at a time, and free-for-all means everyone draws at once. The switch between them is the whiteboard entry in the moderation panel, which decides whether participants can draw or only watch.
| Mode | Use it for | How you set it | How it fails |
|---|---|---|---|
| Demonstration | Teaching a new procedure, modelling working, marking live | Restrict the whiteboard in the moderation panel | It becomes a lecture. Nobody has to do anything, so nobody does. Cap it at a few minutes, then hand over |
| Invited turns | Checking one student’s thinking, letting a student teach a step | Keep it restricted, grant one student, revoke when they finish | Dead air. Twenty students watch one person think in silence. Give them the problem before the pen, and keep talking while they draw |
| Free-for-all | Brainstorming, vocabulary walls, parallel practice, sorting tasks | Allow the whiteboard for everyone | Collision. Two students draw in the same spot, someone drags the canvas out from under everyone, someone erases work that was not theirs |
Restricted students see a note that the host has restricted drawing, with a one-click way to ask for access. Granting it opens the shared board for them and lifts the read-only lock in one action.
Most teachers overuse demonstration mode because it is the safest. The useful discipline is to decide in advance which minute of the lesson the pen changes hands, the same way you would plan when to stop talking.
How do you stop students drawing over each other?
Give the canvas a structure before you open drawing to everyone. Draw a labelled box for each student or group and tell them to stay inside their box. Nearly every free-for-all failure is spatial, and a grid you draw in ten seconds prevents most of them.
- Draw and label one zone per student or group before you allow drawing
- Say the rule out loud: work inside your own box, erase nothing but your own
- Paste any reference image before you switch modes, so it is locked against the eraser
- Keep one board under 25 people, and use breakout rooms for larger classes
- Save a copy before anyone touches clear canvas
- Switch back to restricted mode the moment the activity ends
The pattern is the same one that makes muting work: the tool only helps if the class knows the convention attached to it. Our guide to managing a noisy online classroom makes that case for microphones, and a shared pen needs it just as much.
What should you do with the whiteboard after class?
Export it before you end the meeting, because the board does not outlive the session. Use Export image for a PNG or SVG students can open anywhere, or Save to disk for an .excalidraw file you can reopen and keep building on next week. A board that vanishes is a lesson nobody can revise from.
| What you want | Save it as | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Something students can open on a phone | PNG image | Posting to the class chat or your LMS |
| Something that stays sharp when zoomed | SVG image | Printing, and diagrams with small text |
| Something you can carry into next lesson | .excalidraw file | Reopening with Load scene and adding to it |
| A quick grab of the current view | Screenshot button in the board toolbar | Capturing one step mid-lesson without breaking flow |
The menu also has Load scene, which turns a board into a series. Open last week’s file at the start of the lesson and the class sees exactly where you stopped, messy bits included.
In the desktop app, saved boards land in a Whiteboards folder and appear in your dashboard library. In a browser you get an ordinary download. Either way, name the file after the class and the topic rather than the date, for the same reason the room naming convention in our guide to setting up a virtual classroom uses class names. Dates find a file you already remember, topics find one you do not.
Is a built-in whiteboard enough, or do you need Miro or FigJam?
For live teaching, the board inside the meeting wins on friction: nobody signs into a second product, and nobody loses the class while another tab loads. Dedicated tools like Miro and FigJam are genuinely better when the board is a long-lived artefact a group returns to for weeks, with templates, comments and version history. For a canvas that is drawn, used and exported inside one lesson, the in-meeting board is the right size of tool.
Two facts are worth carrying into that decision. Zoom’s free Workplace plan includes Zoom Whiteboard Basic, which is capped at 3 concurrently editable whiteboards, a ceiling a teacher with five classes reaches in the first week. And Google Jamboard, which a lot of schools standardised on, stopped accepting edits on 1 October 2024, with existing Jams converted to PDFs in Drive.
As of August 2026. Vendor limits change, so check before relying on either figure.
The Jamboard case is the argument for caring about file format. Because our board is Excalidraw, an .excalidraw file you save from a lesson opens in excalidraw.com or any other Excalidraw editor, with no Sonacove account involved. If your archive has to outlast the tool you made it in, that matters more than any feature comparison.
What else should you set up before a whiteboard lesson?
A board is one part of a session that also needs a room students can find, a rule about who speaks, and something for the class to do while someone else holds the pen. Settle those once and whiteboard activities stop needing improvisation.
- Keeping students engaged in online classes, for the cadence of interaction a drawing task fits into.
- Using polls in online teaching, for checking whether the thing you just drew actually landed.
- The full Sonacove Meets feature list, for what sits in the meeting alongside the board.