Lucid | Tech Teaching Tips from Timothy Corvidae
Are you so sad that they’ve taken Jamboard away from us all?
Or are you thinking, what was Jamboard?
Either way, I’ve got good news for you. Evergreen has an excellent, clear choice to replace Jamboard in our teaching. It’s free to us and works inside of Canvas to keep the tech we’re asking our student to use streamlined, secure, and easy to find.
But what is it? Lucid is a collaborative online whiteboard that you can use for both synchronous and asynchronous activities. You can also assign individual Lucid boards for students, if you want to use it for individual work. We and our students can create an unlimited number of boards, so go wild! Here’s Evergreen’s Help Guide to working with Lucid in Canvas. Below are additional tips for how you might use Lucid in your teaching.
Signing in to Lucid for the First Time
Both faculty and students will need to jump through a few hoops to get Lucid working. Once you’ve done this, it should work seamlessly with your Evergreen login.
Below are step-by-step directions for accessing Lucid the first time via Canvas:
Setting up assignments and activities in Canvas using Lucid
To set up an assignment using a Lucid board in Canvas, follow instructions to Create an assignment. This will allow you to create an individual Lucid board for each student (or each group, if you make it a group assignment) based on a single board you set up.
To create a collaborative board for the whole class, it’s better to embed a Lucid board in a Canvas page (or announcement, assignment, quiz, discussion, or syllabus). This short video (1:37) talks you through how to embed a collaborative Lucid board anywhere in Canvas.
Navigating a Lucid Board
Here are some tips for using a Lucid board, once you have one set up:
Scale can be one of the more confusing things about online whiteboards. These boards have infinite scale, and when you enter a board, it might be quite zoomed out. I recommend starting with the board at about 50-75% scale. This allows you to zoom out when you need to see everything on the board, and also allows for some zooming in if anyone needs to get to increase font size to be able to comfortably read something.
Lucid boards are infinite. This means that you can scroll in any direction and add content. You can scroll and scroll and scroll, so give students guidelines about how far to spread out, so work does not get lost from view.
Navigation tools appear in a menu at the bottom right of the board. These allow you to scale, move around, view a mini-map of the board, and view a table of contents of what’s on the board.
Writing, drawing, and upload tools appear in a menu on the left of the board. This is everything you will need to contribute to the board.
Collaboration controls appear on the top right of the board. If you click on the people icon, you can follow others or invite them to follow you (this is very helpful when a whole class is trying to look at something together). You can also adjust how contributors are viewed, add comments, set a timer or a vote, record a video as you move around the board (this might be helpful for making an instructional video for students), or make a presentation from the board.
How students can add to the board
Let students know if you want them to write their contributions on sticky notes, loose on the board, or in some other format.
Sticky notes
These are great for containing/equalizing the length of student contributions, and for allowing you or students to arrange notes into themes by moving or color coding them. If you want to make a discussion visual, this is a good choice.
Typing directly on the board
If you want students to be unconstrained in how much they write, and you want the focus on the text itself, you can direct them to click on the T in the left menu, click anywhere on the board, and start writing. The text box can be moved around.
Adding images or pdfs to the board
If you want students to use the board to share their work, this can be done with pdfs or other forms of image files. We are not able to directly upload Word or PowerPoint documents, unfortunately.
Use a template to organize contributions
Lucid provides many, many pre-made templates of different kinds of graphic organizers, from flow charts to concept maps to business model canvases and logic models. You can select a template and instruct students in how it can organize their collaborative work, or you might want students to explore the templates themselves and decide what could help them organize their ideas.
