What is Miro?
Miro is a "digital collaboration platform designed to facilitate remote and distributed team communication and project management." For the purposes of typical K12 and Higher Education classrooms, it can serve as an online, collaborative whiteboard and content repository. This allows students to work together live on the Miro board by creating and formatting content, collecting multimedia files, and sharing the entire collaborative space directly, similar to Google's ecosystem.
Advantages
Because it is designed for professional use, the tool is well-designed and very powerful. The collaborative features are fast, sleek, and effective. It is designed to be easily shared and accessed by many people. A major advantage over other collaborative whiteboards that are commonly used in education is the fact that Miro is very free-form and can allow people to create and facilitate collaborate tasks in almost any form or format. The platform also offers a free tier for student accounts which makes casual use of the tool feasible and makes it accessible to all kinds of settings. At the same time, teachers who are serious about the tool can invest in a paid account that lets them manage the accounts of their students if they desire. Finally, and most importantly, this is an authentic tool that is actually used by professionals in a variety of professional settings. It is much better for us to use "real" tools when teaching students rather than cheap approximations as this enhances their learning experience and better allows for the learning to transfer out of the classroom.
