Recently, my wife and I had to face the fact that our daughter's 8th grade math skills were not keeping pace with the increasing complexities of her Algebra coursework. Clearly, the services of a tutor were needed. But who and where? Fortunately, we had a family friend, an excellent retired math teacher who was willing to lend her services once a week for free. The rub was she lived a time zone away in Arizona. We could certainly use SKYPE to handle video conferencing between the parties. But we also needed a good, preferably free, Web 2.0 collaboration app for displaying math solutions in real time.
As it happened, there is a free Web collaboration app with a shared realtime whiteboard. The app is a web site called, Twiddla.com.
To get started with Twiddla simply click the button that says, "Go, start a new meeting". And you're in! There's no login, no special usernames or passwords to memorize or forget. You simply share ideas, or upload and edit MS Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or PDF). To make things easier, Twiddla has a set of shape tools and drawing pens to facilitate on the fly charts that you can use without affecting the document. Twiddla also let's you upload images. It has a built-in Chat feature and Internet audio so that everyone can talk over each other just as if they were face to face.
"Wow!" you're probably thinking, "How can they afford to do all of this for free?" You're right. They can't. As you might have guessed the (free) guest account version of Twiddla does not have access to all of the app's full features. Guest account cannot save their session work. Simultaneous audio is greyed out. EtherPad, the online word processing tool is inactive. Screen capture? Nope. Tech Support? C'mon! For these and all of Twiddla's robust features you need a paying account (After all, this is a business). And to be fair the fee structure is quite reasonable. $14.00 a month unlocks all of Twiddla's goodies for large or small groups. Suddenly not sounding like such a good deal? Hold on!
Twiddla wants to curry the favor of educators who, after all have frequent meetings with their colleagues, parents, other interested parties. For these wonderful folks, the full featured version of Twiddla is FREE!
Twiddla wants to curry the favor of educators who, after all have frequent meetings with their colleagues, parents, other interested parties. For these wonderful folks, the full featured version of Twiddla is FREE!
And full featured it is. (The example interface is on the left). Import options to the whiteboard are accessed from the top screen toolbar. They include: websites, fully editable MS Office documents plain text, and images. The tool bar also sports a menu of shape tools, drawing /erasing tools, color palettes, and good 'ol keyboard entries. The bottom screen has tabs filled with useful math formulas, widgets and coding opportunities.
As an educator or student you can get all of these robust features without charge. Start by emailing info@twiddla.com to get things rolling.
Now my daughter does distance tutoring through Twiddla.com. And as I indicated at the outset, we use SKYPE on a second monitor for face to face video conferencing. Smart, easy to use, real time collaboration can be achieved elegantly with Twiddla.com. Things might be looking up for educators after all!
