An online whiteboard for tutoring: how to choose one and run a lesson on it

Explain a fraction in words and the student nods. Draw it, split the circle, cross out what cancels — and they understand. Face to face, a sheet of paper between you does that job. Online there is no sheet, and most tutors spend their first months improvising: writing on paper and holding it up to the camera, typing equations into a document, drawing with a mouse.

It all works while the lesson is a conversation. The moment you need to work through a six-line equation, annotate a paragraph for an English essay, or show exactly where the student went wrong, it turns out you need a shared surface: somewhere both of you write, and where what was written stays put.

So the question is not whether you need a board but which one. Three things depend on the answer, and people tend to notice them only after choosing: whether the student can write, whether the board is still there next lesson, and whether what you did on it ever reaches the lesson notes and the homework.

None of these is a mistake. Each just has a limit, and it is better to know it before you move twenty students onto it.

Screen sharing with any drawing app. The easiest start: nothing to explain to the student, they simply watch. The limit is in that word — they watch. They cannot write on your screen, and the picture is only as good as the connection: small handwriting turns into a blur exactly when the bandwidth drops.

The whiteboard in your video-call app. It is already there, and the student can draw. But it is the call’s board, not the student’s: it has no idea who you are teaching, which lesson this is or what happened last time. Free tiers also count boards — on Zoom’s basic plan you can have three editable whiteboards at once (Zoom).

A dedicated whiteboard service such as Miro. The most capable tool of the four: an infinite canvas, a huge template library, excellent collaboration. But it is built for teams planning projects, not for a lesson with a thirteen-year-old — the student needs an account or has to find their way through guest access, and the free plan gives you three editable boards (Miro). For a tutor with fifteen students that means a paid plan or constantly wiping old work.

A word on Jamboard, which a lot of teachers relied on: Google shut it down on 31 December 2024, and Jam files became inaccessible after that date (Google). A useful reminder that a free tool holding several years of your work can disappear without asking you.

A board inside the software where you already keep your students. As a general-purpose tool it is weaker than Miro. What it has is the one thing none of the others do: it knows whose lesson this is, which board you used last time and what has been set. The rest of this article is about that.

A board for a meeting and a board for a lesson look alike and are not the same thing. If you are choosing for teaching rather than brainstorming, this is what to look at.

In Tutorio the board does not sit off to one side: it is attached to the lesson. Open a lesson and the first section on the page is the board, with a row of tiles for how to start — a blank sheet, squared paper, a coordinate plane, a lesson plan, or the rest of the templates.

The most useful tile is “Continue from the last lesson”. It appears when the previous lesson with this student or group had a board, and it attaches that same board to the new lesson: everything written stays, you add a page and carry on. You end up with one exercise book for the whole course, where you can flip back and say, “three weeks ago you got this wrong — now you don’t.”

After the lesson the board does not hang in mid-air. The dialog you use to mark the lesson as taught already has “Add the board to the notes” ticked, and each page becomes an image in the lesson record. The student and their parents see them in the portal along with the rest of the notes once you share the record. What you explained on the board does not need photographing or sending separately.

The board saves on its own, a second or two after every change. If the connection goes you can keep working: the changes wait for the network, and if you close the tab while offline they are restored when you next open the board on that device.

Getting a student onto the board takes no sign-up and no password. The editor has an “Invite” button with a link to copy, a QR code for a tablet, and a button that sends the link to the student on Telegram. They open it, type their name, and they are in. If they have a student portal account, they can join from there under their own name.

There are three access modes: “Only me” (the board is your draft), “View” (the student watches you write but cannot draw) and “Draw”. A change applies at once to everyone already on the board: say “now just watch”, switch to View, and the student’s tools disappear with nothing to reload.

During the lesson you see everyone’s cursor with their name, so it is clear who is looking where. “Follow me” keeps students on your part of the board — where you scroll, they go. A shared timer counts down a task identically for everyone, a small thing that saves a lot of friction in a group.

If a link gets forwarded to someone it shouldn’t, one button replaces it and the old one stops working immediately. Up to 30 people can be on a board at once — more than enough for one-to-one lessons and small groups.

Ordinary online homework goes like this: you send a file, the student works in an exercise book, photographs it under a desk lamp, sends you a skewed picture, and you squint at it and type feedback in a separate message. A board shortens that route.

You prepare one homework board — the question, a graph, some cards, a photo of a textbook page. When you share the lesson record, each student gets their own copy. They work directly on it and press “Hand in”: the board’s pages become images in an ordinary submission, which you review the same way you would a photo of an exercise book.

You can mark it right on the student’s board. The pen there is already red — circle the slip, write a hint beside it, and the student sees your corrections on their own board. Send the work back for another go and they can draw again and resubmit.

In a group everyone works on their own copy and nobody sees anyone else’s answers. And one detail that keeps the records honest: handing work in never marks it complete by itself — you do that.

Maths on a plain whiteboard is painful: you trace the formula with a mouse and sketch the parabola by eye. Here formulas are typed in an editor the way you would write them — a slash makes a fraction, a caret a power, and there are ready structures for roots, simultaneous equations, logarithms and limits. A graph is plotted from its equation — 2x + 1, x^2 − 4, sin x — and a double-click lets you change it without redrawing.

For geometry there are angles set in degrees, polygons, and solids with hidden edges dashed the way a textbook prints them. A ruler and a protractor sit over the board as transparent overlays, and a pen line drawn along the ruler comes out straight. A smart pen turns a hand-drawn triangle or circle into a clean shape.

Languages get a different set. Word cards: paste a list of “word — translation” pairs and each line becomes a card with the translation on the back, ready to flip. Exercises — match the pairs, fill the gaps, build the sentence, sort into groups — are assembled from your own text in a minute. A cover hides an answer until you reveal it. Text can be read aloud, and accented letters and phonetic symbols go in with one tap — handy for French, German or Spanish, and for IELTS pronunciation work.

Some things serve every subject: PDF pages become board pages you can write over, audio and YouTube video can sit on the board, and the finished result exports as PNG, PDF or SVG.

Being straight about limits is part of choosing. These are the ones that actually affect working with the board in Tutorio.

It gives the most to people who teach a subject that has to be written out: maths, physics, chemistry, languages. And to anyone with more than five students — that is the point at which “where is our board from last time?” becomes a weekly question.

It works well in groups: everyone sees the same thing, there is one timer for all, and each student does the homework on their own copy. And it is close to essential if you want the student to leave with notes rather than just a memory.

Now the other side, honestly. If you teach conversational English to adults and write three words a lesson, you probably do not need a board at all — the chat will do. If your team has worked in Miro for years and has hundreds of boards there, moving them makes no sense: the big services genuinely do more as general-purpose tools. And if you teach in person at one table, a sheet of paper is still the best whiteboard in the world.

A built-in board does not win on feature count. It wins by standing next to your records: the lesson, the student, the notes and the homework are already there, and the board simply becomes part of them.

A whiteboard in an online lesson is the shared sheet of paper that is missing between you and the student. Screen sharing shows but does not let them write; a video-call board lets them write but knows nothing about the student; the big whiteboard services do the most, but are built for teams and count boards on their free plans.

The board inside Tutorio is attached to the lesson: you can continue it next time, the student joins by link with no sign-up, its pages go into the notes with one tap, and the board itself can be set as homework with a separate copy for each student.

Try it with one student and one lesson: open the lesson, pick squared paper or a blank sheet, and send the link. If next time your hand goes straight to “Continue from the last lesson”, the tool suits you.