Google Jamboard is a collaborative whiteboard, available as an add-on to Google Workspaces.
$4,999
Google Slides
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Google Slides is a presentation tool that enables users to create, edit, collaborate, and present. It is free for personal use, and available to businesses via a Google Workspaces subscription.
Google Jamboard is ideal for live, synchronous sessions to support collaboration and engagement. It can be used for the entire class, small group, or independent work. Create a Jamboard for a simple student knowledge check, or annotation exercise, or sorting activity. Insert a Google document, spreadsheet, or presentation, and have students annotate the file. There are many types of active learning activities you can do with a Google Jamboard!
Well-suited to working on presentations or PowerPoint-style documents, including setting up templated slides and working collaboratively on presentations. It's less well-suited to setting up printable documents, though I have used it for simple printable documents, you just need to remember to set the slide size to A4 (or your preferred paper size) measurements.
The popularity for Google Slides among the casual technology tool users is so great that we are not in a position to replace this tool with anything else. Every other tool either doesn't have the popularity, or doesn't match the ease of sharing level of Slides. The training needed to learn a different tool is too great. Google Slides is very easy to pick up and master.
It's a tool that's easily accessible from your Google Suite. For a whiteboarding workspace, it provides a good basic platform. Multiple whiteboards can be created in one workspace, so you can share a session with multiple teams/plants. Compared to more advanced whiteboarding tools, it has limited features. You'll need to have access to the Internet to take full advantage of the collaborative workspace. The amount of storage space required for your session will use up your Google Drive quota.
Google Slides is very easy and intuitive for creating simple, straightforward presentations. Its limitations make for less decision making. Being part of the Google Suite makes for easy sharing and collaboration, auto-saving, and time-stamped versions/edit history. However, unlike a platform like Canva, there's no icon library, photos, graphics, or elements built-in, so if you're wanting more creative designs, you have to import or create yourself.
Miro is more user friendly, and interactive as compared to Google Jamboard. Advantages of using jamboard would be that since it's a part of the Google suite, individuals are more comfortable using the tool and tracking changes/updates. Both can be used for collaboration, and brainstorming. Miro holds more features, since we can add emojis, stickers, media content etc.
Google Slides works both online and offline, they are free to use if you have a Google account. Easy to share and are supported by most web browsers. A great addition to your arsenal of interactive educational online platforms.
