Using an Electronic Whiteboard For Video Conferencing

To coin a phrase, the electronic whiteboards that are available today are not your father’s whiteboards. With several capabilities you may never have even thought of, the electronic whiteboards of today are advanced business tools. Here are a few tips on how to best use them.

Practice.

Practice using a whiteboard? Definitely. When it comes to the most advanced models of whiteboard, we can’t stress enough that you will want to get an idea of what it is capable of. For starters, you will want to get an idea of which pen colors translate best, as well as a general feel for the instrument. To be exact, it will be worth your while to make sure that the information you are writing on the board gets transferred to electronic data, and it can sometimes take a little time to learn how much pressure you need exert for the software to pick it all up. Not that this is a difficult task, it is just something that you will want to have down before it’s time for your big presentation.

There are so many options available with electronic boards, that you will want to make sure you spend some time getting to know what its capabilities are before you use it. The enhanced capabilities of these boards will not only make your presentation better an more convenient for your audience, the advanced may surprise and delight your audience and make your video conference really shine.

Project.

If you do a lot of remote video conferencing, and your audiences vary in size or tend to the large, you will want to make sure that the board you purchase can connect to a digital projector. That way, most larger halls or even theater sized venues are not a problem as long as these venues are equipped with either some sort of screen or a large expanse of wall for you to project your images onto. As with any presentation, you want to make sure that every member of the audience can see whatever it is that you are writing on your board, and by using a good projector, you can multiply the size of your image many times over.

Connect.

Most of the better electronic whiteboards today allow you to do all sorts of things that you might never have imagined. Typically, using a USB port (and even sometimes via bluetooth or Wifi) you can save your presentation for printing, emailing, and otherwise sharing the information right onto your participants’ laptops or PDAs. This is a great way to ensure that everyone in the meeting emerges with exactly the same data. With a lot of these newer whiteboards, you can save each and every board as a PDF before it is erased, and as you move along through your presentation. Some boards are even equipped with the ability to become interactive displays (with the help of a LCD projector).

Hopefully by now, you can see that we really meant it when we suggested in the first section of this article that you take some time and really learn what your electronic whiteboard is capable of.