Lessonspace

June 20, 2019

Drawing to Infinity: Announcing Infinite Whiteboard

Please note that this post might include outdated information. For more up to date information about the whiteboard, click here.

When using a Lessonspace whiteboard tab, often you may have found the need for a little more space to draw or annotate what you're working on. A little space is kinda cool, but you know what's really cool? Infinite space!

<iframe width="853" height="450" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9YbfK509MuI?rel=0&controls=0&showinfo=0" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Introducing the Infinite Whiteboard

This might sound like something obvious or easy to do, but this is something we've seen many other products struggle to get right. So we spent an extensive amount of time making sure we made something that really worked for students and tutors.

The first big problem to solve was "getting lost in infinity." Often during the course of a lesson, the tutor may jump back to another section of the whiteboard, and the student has no idea where their tutor is looking. Add to this the compounding problem of students and tutors having different screen sizes, and we have a real complex problem on our hands.

So how did we solve it? Well, if you've been keeping up, the first thing we did was launch Leading Mode last week. Leading Mode enables a tutor to lock a student into a "state of following", so they can be sure their students are always seeing exactly what they are seeing.

When we combine Leading Mode with the Infinite Whiteboard tutors are now able to lock everyone onto the same section of the whiteboard, so they never have to worry about anyone getting lost.

In addition to this, we added something called viewport size detection. It sounds fancy, but basically this calculates the area of the whiteboard the other people in your space are currently able to see, and displays this on your screen as a rectangle with a dashed border, labelled with the person's name.

We'd love to hear what you think, remember you can always see what we're working on our product roadmap.

Bonus Feature: Light Mode

Something we also snuck into your Spaces with this launch, that you may have already come across, is a new Light Mode! If the standard user interface is a tad dark for you, use the toggle in the general menu to switch on the lights! Lessonspace Light Mode