Virtual Whiteboard And Chat For A Learning Management System

In this work we present a virtual whiteboard and chat tool which has been developed and integrated in a learning management system (SWAD). It is being used as a teaching aid for several degrees at the University of Granada (UGR). Since it started being used, at the end of academic year 2006/2007, it has been successfully used in several courses. This new tool solves some of the disadvantages that appear in other similar chat systems. We may remark as its main features the following: user identification by the use of photographs and full names, chat and whiteboard sessions storage, its ease of use and its accessibility, in the sense that it is able to work in a wide variety of platforms and does not require any installation process. In this paper we intend to motivate its usefulness and to describe the application itself, giving some details about its implementation; besides, we will show some use statistics and will propose some future work.