My mom is a retired teacher, and she's been doing remote preK for my 5yo and my niece for a couple of hours a day so the grownups can get work done. Evaluating

My mom is a retired teacher, and she's been doing remote preK for my 5yo and my niece for a couple of hours a day so the grownups can get work done. Evaluating whiteboards for a 60-year-old and two 5-year-olds to use together with video chat was.... not super fun. What we've settled on: We do the video chat on an old fullscreen iMac we had lying around. My mom and each kid all have their own iPads. For the first couple of weeks we used a webwhiteboard, but the littles were having a LOT of trouble with it. It's not optimized for iPads. It's easy to click on links in the nav. Different size screens see different regions of the whiteboard. My niece and son kept clearing each other's work and causing fights. I ended up building a little prototype for them with rails/websockets that tried to solve all the dumb stuff that makes it hard to use it on iPads. Apple really doesn't make it easy, though. You can bookmark a page to your homescreen to get rid of the Safari chrome (URL bar is the worst for 5yos), but then you can't have cookies and regular usage (maybe just while fullscreen?) will prompt you that the webpage is trying to steal your passwords (fake keyboard warning). Guided access gets rid of most of the obnoxious gestures they were triggering by accident. I disabled most of the multi-touch events in javascript. I fixed the board size with selectable orientation (portrait/landscape) and set it to scale + aspect-fits to everyone's device. I added a simple host/guest permission model so my mom has a few teacher permissions that the kids don't have. She can either be in teacher mode (she can draw/clear, they can't), class mode (anyone can draw/clear), or student mode where each kid gets their own private board that she can swap between (she can still draw/clear on student boards). I was starting to work on more teaching features -- the ability for her to save/load sketches so she could do lesson plans ahead of time, the ability for her to "broadcast" saved boards to the student boards so she could make assignments for each 5yo to fill out. We had kind of a rough stretch where one of the kids or the other would forget their tablet for about a week, though, and my mom got fed up and just ordered them workbooks for all 3 of them that they could do together. It's still running on Heroku, but I haven't been working on it much lately. http://yiayiaboard.herokuapp.com/rooms/sLZqbw2KHWi http://yiayiaboard.herokuapp.com/rooms/sLZqbw2KHWi I think this is the right model for small-class whiteboards, but I think you'd have to build a native solution to make it usable for kids that small. When it worked, it was pretty magical!