Online Whiteboard for Google Meet: Teach Visually in Meet Calls

To use an online whiteboard in Google Meet, add the Educastic Google Meet add-on, sign in with your Educastic account and open the whiteboard inside your Meet call. You keep Meet's video, chat and participants, and teach on a full whiteboard with pens, shapes, PDFs and math tools in the same window.

Many schools and tutors already run their lessons in Google Meet. Students know the link and the calendar invite arrives on its own. What Meet does not give a teacher is a proper board to write, draw and solve problems on. Sharing a screen with a drawing app is clumsy, and students cannot write back. This guide shows how to teach with the add-on and when a full Educastic session is the better choice.

Why add a whiteboard to Google Meet?

A whiteboard lets you show how an idea is built, step by step, which a video call alone cannot do. Teaching most subjects needs seeing: a worked example built line by line, a labelled diagram, a marked-up worksheet. Inside Meet, the Educastic add-on gives you:

• The whiteboard and its tools: pens, highlighters, shapes, arrows and text boxes.
• Teaching backgrounds such as dots, graph (squared), ruled lines, coordinate plane and isometric.
• File upload, so your images and PDFs can go on the board and be annotated live.
• The Cloud Drive picker, to bring in files from your cloud storage.

All of it stays in the same place as the conversation, instead of in a separate tab you keep switching to.

How do you use the Educastic whiteboard in a Meet lesson?

You add the Educastic add-on to Google Meet, sign in with your Educastic account and open the whiteboard from inside the call. Step by step:

1. Add the Educastic add-on to Google Meet once, before your first lesson.
2. Start your Meet call as usual. Students join from the same link or calendar invite they always use.
3. Open the Educastic add-on and sign in with your Educastic account.
4. Prepare the board before you explain. Choose a background and upload the image or PDF you need, so students are not watching you search for files.
5. Teach on the board. Talk while you write, and use one colour for working and a second for notes.

Tip: prepare your materials before the call. A few minutes of setup saves the awkward silence at the start of class.

What changes when the whiteboard runs inside Meet?

Inside Meet, the Educastic add-on uses Meet's own chat and participant list, and hides Educastic's recording, Educastic chat, the notebook, session reports and the email invite. That keeps the call simple: Meet handles who is in the room and the conversation, and Educastic handles the board.

In practice this means you manage attendance and messages in Meet as usual. If you need a recording or a session report from Educastic, run that lesson as a full Educastic session instead.

Which teaching habits work best on a whiteboard in Meet?

The habits that work best are writing as you talk, keeping pages uncluttered and checking understanding every few minutes.

• Write as you talk. Students follow handwriting far better than a finished slide, because they see the order in which the idea is built.
• Point with the laser pointer instead of adding marks to the board.
• Open a new tab instead of erasing a full page, so earlier work stays available.
• Zoom in on details. Some students join Meet from a phone, so make your writing larger than feels natural.
• Ask a question every few minutes and wait for answers in Meet's chat before moving on.

Should you use Meet with the add-on or a full Educastic session?

Use Meet with the add-on when your school requires Meet or the lesson is mainly an explanation, and use a full Educastic session when you want recordings, reports and class controls in one place. Both use the same whiteboard. The difference is everything around it.

How do you schedule a full Educastic session?

Schedule a full Educastic session by adding your guests and the duration, then sharing the invite link. Educastic syncs with Google Calendar, so the session appears alongside your other lessons. Students join from the link in their browser, with no app to install.

Many teachers combine both in one week: a short explanation in the school's Meet call with the add-on on Monday, then a full Educastic session on Friday with an in-class test and a recording for students who missed it. For a full walkthrough of a live whiteboard lesson, read how to teach online with a whiteboard.

Frequently asked questions

Can I use a whiteboard in Google Meet? Yes. The Educastic Google Meet add-on opens the Educastic whiteboard inside Google Meet.

Do I need an Educastic account to use the add-on? Yes. The teacher signs in with an Educastic account inside Meet.

Can I record the class from inside Meet with Educastic? No. Educastic recording is hidden inside Meet, so run a full Educastic session when you want to record.

Can I upload PDFs to the whiteboard in Meet? Yes. File upload and the Cloud Drive picker work in the Educastic add-on.

Is the Educastic whiteboard free? Yes. Educastic includes all of its teaching features in the free version.

Bring a whiteboard to your next Meet lesson

Create a free account, explore the Educastic online whiteboard and use it in your next Google Meet lesson, or schedule a full session for your next practice class.

Get the whiteboard free