OpenBoard

What OpenBoard does

OpenBoard is whiteboard software for teaching. It runs on the teacher’s computer and is meant to be shown on an interactive whiteboard or a projector, operated with an interactive pen, a graphics tablet or simply a mouse. It descends from Uniboard, created at the University of Lausanne, by way of the Open-Sankoré project, and is now maintained by the Department of Public Education of the Canton of Geneva together with community contributors.

The program has three main modes. Board is the writing surface: pen, highlighter, eraser, straight lines, text, a laser pointer and zoom, with pages shown as thumbnails along the side so a lesson can be prepared page by page and navigated during class. Documents organizes lessons in folders. Web opens a built-in browser, and a capture tool brings any part of the screen onto the board. A fourth option hides the board and lets the teacher annotate directly over the desktop and other applications.

Teaching tools

Much of OpenBoard is designed for the classroom. It includes a ruler, compass, protractor, set square and coordinate axes, plus a curtain and a mask for revealing content step by step. Objects placed on a page can be locked, grouped, rotated, layered and hidden from students. A library holds the teacher’s own images, audio and video alongside built-in shapes, interactive activities and small applications, with a web search and favorites.

Web widgets extend this further. A widget is a web page packaged in a .wgt folder; it can be dragged onto the board and can talk to OpenBoard through an API. The project publishes a template and documentation for building them. PDFs can be imported as pages to annotate and the result exported back to PDF, and a recording feature captures the board with audio for later viewing.

Installing OpenBoard

OpenBoard is a desktop application. Official installers for version 1.7.7 cover Windows 10 and later, macOS 12 and later on Intel and Apple Silicon, and Debian 12; other Linux distributions rely on community packages listed in the project wiki. Version 1.8 is in development on a separate branch. The software is built with Qt 6, needs no account, and can be tuned through its preferences window and configuration files.

Hosted version

None. OpenBoard runs locally and has no online service.

Limitations

OpenBoard is a presentation whiteboard for one room, not a shared online board: several people cannot edit the same board over the internet, so it does not replace Miro for remote teams. Debian is the only officially supported Linux distribution. The user manuals on the website were written for version 1.6, and documents are stored in OpenBoard’s own format, with PDF as the main exchange format.

Who it suits

OpenBoard suits teachers, schools and universities that use interactive displays or projectors and want free classroom software with geometry tools and lesson management. For a browser-based board that several people can draw on at once, look at WBO or Excalidraw.