Microsoft Whiteboard Launches for Education Customers With Cool New Features

Microsoft is today bringing its Whiteboard app to its Education customers. The company is launching a preview for Whiteboard for Edu, which is mostly focused at schools and students. The point of the service is to allow students to collaborate with each other and help teacher brainstorm with all the students in real-time.

Whiteboard for Education is actually much more than that, though. The app actually has more features than the regular version of Whiteboard. It lets you send your whiteboards directly to OneDrive and attach it within your OneNote Notebook, for example.

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The app even lets you change the background of the Whiteboard to reduce eye strain — you can change the color of the background, and even display lines across the whole whiteboard for graphing purposes, etc. The app includes stickers that students can use to add some colors to their Whiteboard, or even use it as a way to give feedback in real time.

But two of the stand out features on Whiteboard for Edu, for me, are the Ink Grab and Ink Beautification features. Ink Beautification simply takes notes written in your handwriting and improves it to be easily readable. Ink Grab, on the other hand, converts pictures of your notes into digital ink, and it’s actually really cool:

Whiteboard for Education is available today for Windows 10 devices, and it will be available on the iPad next week. What I am really interested to see if the Ink Beautification and Ink Grab features will be available for other users of Whiteboard, instead of just being an exclusive feature for Education customers. Right now, the new Whiteboard backgrounds are available to regular Whiteboard users, but I couldn’t use any of the other Education-focused features with a regular Office 365 account.

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  • gregsedwards

    Premium Member
    20 November, 2018 - 3:00 pm

    <p>Microsoft is killing it with all these great education tools. Unfortunately, my kids' schools are technologically inept. Even though the county school system has a parent portal and learning management system, teachers generally send out email blasts directly to class distribution lists or use third-party mobile apps like Remind or Bloomz to communication announcements and reminders. Homework? Yeah, just email a link to whatever cloud storage you use. Grades? We'll send you a link that brings you to a dashboard the administration uses, with codes and weights that make no sense unless you're the teacher. Every teacher kind of rolls their own, and it's typically a huge cluster. </p><p>It'd be amazing to actually see what a school could do by leveraging all this stuff.</p>

    • paulkocz

      Premium Member
      21 November, 2018 - 12:54 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#370323">In reply to gregsedwards:</a></em></blockquote><p>I'm the ICT Manager in a school and show this stuff to teachers all the time – some get it – most don't. To be honest Google are really the one's killing it in EDU. For the teachers that use these sort of tools, it makes there jobs easier. For most though – and I sympathise with them – they are just trying their best to get through the curiculum that the government says they need to teach and tick all the boxes, while controlling 25 odd children who don't want learn (well some don't )! Teachers are awesome and we don't give them enough credit. This sort of tech (for some teachers) just gets in their way. For those who take the time – well I they get to enjoy holidays and breaks a little bit more!</p>

  • overseer

    20 November, 2018 - 3:59 pm

    <p>What I'm having a hard time understanding is why all the different features for different versions. We see this time and time again with the Office365 products. Not sure why we need a different feature set for Education as opposed to Business. Just put the best features out there and let admins disable them if they don't work for your organization. </p><p><br></p><p>I mean I understand why they have class notebooks and assignments in Teams for Education, but really, they could just call it a shared team notebook across the board, and assignments could easily be tasks or planner entries. Just confuses the issue to have the same product behave different in different places, or have the same features named different things in different places. A little bit of consistency would be nice. </p>

    • paulkocz

      Premium Member
      21 November, 2018 - 12:56 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#370348">In reply to overseer:</a></em></blockquote><p>I agree to some extent with you. Just give us everything. If you really want to confuse things, give some a Windows 10 computer with a Microsoft Account and then throw in an EDU account into the mix. No wonder people love Macs and Google! On the other hand, Microsoft's tools and products are for the most part really great to use.</p>

  • dontbe evil

    21 November, 2018 - 2:42 am

    <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> Ink Grab and Ink Beautification are AMAZING</span></p>

  • markking

    05 January, 2019 - 3:10 am

    <p>windows 10 has best way of using less time of your work, full information here visit for <a href="https://windowsclassroom.com/how-to-split-screen-on-windows-10/&quot; target="_blank">how to do split screen on windows 10</a> to do work properly with two windows screen in one desktop or laptop using less time.</p>

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