I was recently invited to gve a demo of a new whiteboard product I've put together for use in Second Life or OpenSim to the SLExperiments education group. The demo was conducted in the KnowSense virtual classroom in Second Life, to a gathering of around 6 people. The nice folk from SLExperiments were very interested and full of intelligent and useful questions, and were kind enough to post the entire chat log on their blog (NB - My SL Avatar is Richard Meiklejohn).
The product itself combines an interactive, shared whiteboard, web page display and streaming video display into one easy to use chat-controlled screen. There are lots of free sign-up collaboration tools on the web that allow collaborative whiteboarding between team members, such that anything drawn by the participants appears on all participants screens. I conducted a survey of all the tools I could find out there, trying each of them on a prim in SL until I found one that would display the updates (many are flash or applet based and simply won't work). I only found one that would work - www.skrbl.com. Hence my board is basically a glorified wrapper for Skrbl. It allows the screen to be swapped from displaying a shared Skrbl board to displaying any web page and back with simple chat commands. When in whiteboard mode, it overlays a nice frame to mask the chrome that Skrbl has, so users are not tempted to try to actually draw on the screen in world. Anyone wanting to draw on the board simply clicks on the screen to bring up the Skrbl board in a normal browser. Everything drawn is then visible immediately to everyone in the virtual classroom. One of the attendees (Calisto Encinal) is considering using the board to create a graffitti wall in the mexican themed town he is building.