Okay, so, you may have seen pictures or videos of people doing cool stuff with medium-size whiteboards in their classes, and by medium-size I mean not the big one that's on the wall, nor the tiny paper-size ones, but the ones that are a couple of feet square, big enough for a couple of people to simultaneously write on, but small enough to fit on a table or at least balance on a couple of desks. Here's some of my students doing concept maps on these whiteboards at the end of Calculus II:

I like the hell out of these things because they are collaborative spaces. You don't even have to tell people that they're supposed to work together on this thing: the physical size of the board just kinda implies that it's the obvious and natural thing to do. Students almost can't help but work together when the space looks like this. If there's one thing I love, it's tricking students into doing something cool in such a way that it's not evident that it was a trick. :)

The basics

So where do you get these things? Turns out that it's super cheap and easy to make yourself a classroom set of these out of tileboard. You can buy a 4' x 8' sheet of tileboard at your local home improvement warehouse store, whether it be the orange one or the blue one, for about $15.

4' x 8' is big. You'll need to cut it down to a more manageable size. I suggest that you cut it into 6 pieces by cutting the 4' side in half and the 8' side in three – then each of the resulting pieces will measure (about) 24” x 32”. (Of course you could also make eight 2' x 2' squares.) Since you probably don't have your own table saw, you will probably want to have this done for you at the home improvement warehouse store. Here's a big ol' blog post about how you can do this.

That's it! You're done! You now have a bunch of collaborative-size whiteboards, yay!

What's that you say? You want some bonus pro tips for getting even fancier?! Well YOU'RE IN LUCK, because here's some

Bonus pro tips!

So, now you have whiteboards, but a whiteboard without markers is sad. Get yourself a bunch of cheap food storage containers. Pack each one with five or six markers in different colors and a small eraser or two. These containers are awesome because they stack in each other pretty well and it makes it way easier to hand each group of students a little pre-packaged bucket of markers.

Here's my favorite whiteboard-related pro tip that works just as well on your big wall-mounted unit as it does on these collaborative ones. The big problem with whiteboards is when they get all smeary and gross and make everything illegible. If this happens to you, clean the whiteboards really well with some of that Expo cleaner or Windex or whatever, and then bust out the secret weapon: Turtle Wax. Smear a thin layer of this magical paste on with a microfiber cloth, rub it in real good, let it dry for 24 hours, and then buff it back off with a (clean!) microfiber cloth. Your markers will now erase like an absolute dream. Bonus points for doing this when your whiteboards are brand new and haven't had time to get all stained and gross yet.