Figma

Figma is a professional tool for graphic designers, developers, and creators where people can create interactive versions of apps and websites and collaborate to add comments and make changes. Within this larger tool is a collaborative whiteboard tool called FigJam, which offers a simpler interface geared toward a broader audience that includes teachers and students.  

It's worth noting that Figma has been in the news: tech giant Adobe was in talks to acquire Figma for $20B when that deal broke down in late 2023. Meanwhile, Figma has promoted Figma for Education more actively since Google announced that it will end support for its widely used Jamboard tools in late 2024. 

To get started with FigJam, teachers use their school email address to create a free educator account, get approved, and can get started almost immediately. Start by browsing the built-in templates marked with a "FigJam for Education" tag and explore how you might use these templates for different activities like brainstorming, mind-mapping, exit tickets or collaborative projects. Then, save a copy of each template to your Drafts folder so you can easily access and edit them. 

Walk through the FigJam Basics template and follow the built-in instructions to learn how to use the tool's features and to learn how different key commands and gestures work on screen. While the "student & educator" templates might be the best fit for the classroom, check out the templates sorted by activity and consider how templates for planning, brainstorming, and diagramming might be helpful graphic organizers or study aids for your students. Also, try FigJam's Jambot AI widget, which uses ChatGPT to create custom templates, sort stickies, generate summaries, and more.  While this feature is geared more towards a corporate  audience, it can also create brainstorms, plans, and flowcharts which can be useful with advanced preparation.

Teachers can create "teams" for their classes or for small groups of students and monitor activity in the collaborative workspaces those teams create, and collaborators can share their creations by sharing a public link to the workspace, embedding the workspace on another website, or by downloading the team-generated text in a spreadsheet that lists the names of the collaborators alongside their contributed text. Keep in mind that students can create their own workspaces, explore templates created by other users, and share their creations freely with these tools, so be sure to set clear expectations and norms around how to use FigJam appropriately in your classroom. 

Editor’s note: Never input personal, sensitive, or confidential information into a generative AI model. Any information you put in can become publicly available and used as training data for future iterations of the tool. If there is ever any doubt about whether or not to enter particular information, do not include it. Be aware of privacy settings on your device that might be helpful. Keep in mind that these tools often don’t have their own privacy settings.