For everyone who knows Google Docs, the easiest way to describe SketchTogether probably is:
It’s like Google Docs, just with a pen.
But let’s get a little more into detail. SketchTogether is a real-time collaborative whiteboard cloud service.
So you can log on to the website, create a new sketch and share it with others who will then also see it in their dashboards.
The true potential comes out when two or more people are on the same sketch. While the first person writes or draws or marks something, all the other persons will see this live, hence it can’t happen that two people try to write in the same spot.
The Idea was developed during a course in university, where we noticed that many people are using the PDF files supplied by the Prof before the course, and annotate it using convertible notebooks or tablets. This made it impossible though to combine the annotations of multiple persons.
That’s where SketchTogether comes to play. The Prof can upload the PDF file in advance, share the resulting sketch with his students and everybody can annotate the file in real time during the lecture. If you don’t want to see someones’ comments anymore (trolls are everywhere :P) you can hide all comments from this person on the page or in the whole document.
This also gives the Professor a feedback about what might be missing in his script.
