Stormboard is a slick new service designed for hosting collaborative online brainstorming activities. Stormboard allows you to create an unlimited amount of “idea boards” or Stormboards with up to five collaborators on each one. Each of your Stormboards can include sticky notes, images, videos, drawings, and word documents. Moving items around on your Stormboard is a simple drag and drop process like the one you may have used on services like Padlet. Each item that you add to your Stormboard includes a commenting option that your collaborators can use to give you feedback on your ideas.

Your Stormboards can be created from a template (there are ten templates in the education section) or you can create your Stormboard as a blank canvas. Stormboard includes an an optional zoom feature that you can use to focus on one part of your board instead of viewing the entire board.

Applications for Education
The Stormboard education templates include some good ideas for collaboratively creating character maps, KWL charts, and word walls. You might have students use the word wall template to share pictures that are representative of the words on wall. The character maps could be useful for analyzing a story or for planning the creation of a story. If used for planning a story the drag-and-drop nature of Stormboard notes makes it easy to quickly re-arrange the sequence of a story.