BP10-Web 2.0 #3 Dabbleboard

Figure 1. Dabbleboard Website, Austin (n.d.). Source: dabbleboard.com.

There are an abundance of Web 2.0 tools which can help streamline education. I chose Dabbleboard because of its powerful ability to communicate ideas while offering an extremely user friendly interface. Tools such as this one provide educators with the ability to visualize and share ideas without having to struggle with complicated software applications. Educators can focus more time on content and quality rather than wasting hours working on a single tool which may not even function as expected. Dabbleboard is fun and easy to use. It is an interactive whiteboard application. It automatically detects most common shapes. Dabbleboard allows sharing and real time collaboration. Others can view and edit drawings others have made.

If you've been using MS Paint to brainstorm it's time to upgrade. Dabbleboard is one of the better efforts I've seen. It lets you put together a map of ideas very quickly, and supports both free-hand drawing, along with a system that will automatically convert basic doodles into sold shapes like circles, triangles, and squares.

Dabbleboard's killer feature is that it lets you save bits and pieces of these doodles into your library for later use. Once you've added anything to your library you can simply drag and drop it into whatever you're working on, and the pieces will follow you between projects. This is helpful for any complex design elements or images you've uploaded and plan to use in a later session.

In addition to its library tool, Dabbleboard boasts online collaboration that lets you work with several others at the same time. The one downfall here is that only one person can be actively making changes for it to save, otherwise anything you're working on can be overwritten by someone who jumps in and draws something. The system is smart enough to alert you when the other person is using it, however, I found it to do a poor job at respecting the precedence of an edit that had begun before someone else's.

Any work you've done can be shared in a central library with items that can be copied back to your personal collection for editing and redistribution. You can also embed any of these works on a blog or site with code, which means when someone makes a change it will go live wherever it's been embedded. This is ideal for students working on group projects, or student/teacher collaboration. A teacher can help students brainstorm ideas, or provide constructive feedback with a shared document.