Digital mediums are quickly replacing most forms of communication. At the same time, business and academic circles alike struggle to hold onto physical mediums, where content is written down or drawn. Doing so increases collaboration, creativity, memory, and retention, resulting in better learning and collaborative experiences. People study, learn, and create in more meaningful ways when they connect ideas to physical text and drawing, and retaining that is beneficial for many environments.
This has resulted in a slew of devices ranging from Samsung’s digital whiteboard/flip board to Microsoft’s online-only whiteboard included as a package deal with Office 365.
Manufacturers like Samsung, Sharp, and LG offer dedicated hardware for digital whiteboards. But, for many organizations, the solution lies in touchscreen digital signage, delivering whiteboarding capability to digital displays that also function for projection, video, lectures, and much more. In short, it’s the best of both worlds, and digital signage virtual whiteboarding is often just as cost effective as whiteboarding-only solutions.
Integrate Popular Digital Whiteboarding Apps
A digital signage solution will allow your organization to choose from more in terms of whiteboarding apps and solutions. While options will be limited if you run HTML or Linux-based media players, Windows, Android, and iOS are frequent solutions for digital signage.
This allows you to choose from popular whiteboarding applications ranging from Limnu and IPEVO Annotator to cloud-based solutions like Microsoft Whiteboard, Samsung Flip, Conceptboard, Sketchboard, Mural, and literally hundreds of others.
This enhanced freedom to choose means you can select whiteboarding apps based on teams or users, preferences, and solutions needed, switch between them at ease, and allow every user to get the most out of their digital whiteboarding experience.
Virtual and Remote Collaboration
Digital displays support not just whiteboarding but also video conferencing and collaboration. Teams can work together in the same room while being miles apart, drawing and writing together, and seeing each other speaking. This can greatly improve collaboration even with geographical distances, including over virtual whiteboarding.
Here, you can choose to either implement contributions from multiple devices such as a web-based whiteboard application or link multiple digital displays together to allow group contribution. Each offer value depending on whether your organization wants to allow two teams to collaborate or more people to independently collaborate.
Save Digital Files to the Cloud
Users can create files on a virtual whiteboard, either remotely or by drawing on a physical touch screen. Following collaboration, the entire session can be shared to the cloud, sent to individual users, or forwarded for future use in some other format. Most importantly, digital files support future collaboration and work, allowing individuals to make and take notes on a whiteboard project, to pick it up where they left off, or to add to it digitally following a collaboration session.
While exact functionality will heavily depend on applications, file management, and your own servers, the ability to move from physical drawing mediums on a digital screen (whiteboard) to online edits gives everyone more opportunities to create, share, and then critique and improve that work. Cloud servers may also stem from existing services and apps or your organizations own servers, depending on wishes and functionality.
Group Contributions
Digital displays often support remote editing and control via applications on tablets and other devices. This means that it’s fully possible to have individuals remotely contribute to a whiteboard, either from around the globe, or from seats in a room. So, education sectors could utilize digital displays for presentations and lectures, switch to whiteboard/blackboard mode, have the teacher add context and information, and allow students to add answers, complete any questions, and collaborate in one environment.
Workplaces could utilize digital displays for the same purpose, or could utilize them for brainstorming sessions, for group contributions, and for editing, where everyone works on the same canvas from their own device.
While group editing has long been possible through tools as commonplace as Google Drive, moving to the big screen creates a huge difference in terms of impact and visibility. And, when users can get up, draw on the whiteboard, and immediately have others contribute digitally, it’s that much more accessible and collaborative.
Multi-Use Digital Screens
Digital displays add value nearly everywhere. Whiteboards are extremely useful, but typically only in very select circumstances. Digital signage whiteboarding allows your organization to make the most of your investment by implementing white and blackboards when needed and switching to other mediums when desired.
Digital displays function to share media, display schedules and rosters, offer real-time data and updates, share announcements, push emergency information, and much more, and all alongside whiteboarding.
Digital signage is cheaper, faster, and more efficient to run than ever before. Modern displays offer everything from interactive touchscreen to onboard computers in the form of system on chip, making it easier and more efficient than ever to deploy displays for interactivity, in places that would have been inefficient only a few years ago. Most importantly, digital signage whiteboarding offers a convenient and versatile option to implement both digital signage and digital whiteboarding, truly giving your organization the best of both worlds.
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