Every widget, and what it is for

The Teaching Board’s widget library holds 23 tools, grouped into four sets: Layout, Basics, Chinese and Practice. This is all of them, what each is actually for, and which three need a paid teaching seat. Two more — the Content card and the Dialogue strip — never appear in the library at all; they come out of the Content column instead.

Adding one

Every widget works the same way: click the chip to add it, or drag it onto the slide to place it exactly. Click a card once it is down and the whole left rail becomes that card’s settings; Escape goes back to the list. There is a search box above the chips if you would rather type — it matches names and synonyms, so “circle” finds Shape and “poll” finds Quick check.

Layout

• Section — A container. Drop other cards inside and it lays them out in a row or a column, so “three character cards side by side” survives being resized instead of drifting apart. The only grouping the board has.

Basics

• Text — A plain block of text. Type straight onto the slide or into the panel. One field, no styling — see the note below.
• Sticky note — A coloured note you type onto, in one of six papers. For the aside, the reminder, the thing you want to look handwritten.
• Shape — A rectangle, an ellipse or an arrow, in one of six inks. The arrow points up, down, left or right — it is the one to reach for when you are indicating something, because unlike a freehand scribble you can move and resize it later.
• Picture — One of the site’s 210 photographs, or an upload of your own. Takes an alt description and an optional caption, and fits whole or crops to fill. Uploading needs an account and spends 2 credits.

Chinese

The ten that make this a Chinese board. Every one of them is a thing you would otherwise have made by hand before the lesson, or drawn badly during it.

• Character card — A large hanzi with pinyin, meaning and an optional HSK badge. Search the dictionary in the panel and one pick fills all four fields at once.
• Stroke order — Animates one character, stroke by stroke, with a real transport: previous stroke, play/pause, next stroke, replay, and an “n of m” readout. The step buttons are the point — you can hold the class on stroke four while you explain it.
• Write it — A 田字格 practice grid of up to four cells, written in with a finger, a stylus or a mouse. The guide character can trace, sit faint behind you, or be gone entirely.
• Tone cards — Type a toneless syllable — *ma*, *hao*, *xue* — and get the four tones as cards with a drawn pitch contour and a real example word. Tap one to hear it.
• Say it — Hear a model of a short phrase, record yourself, and see your pitch drawn over the model’s. It shows you the shape of the difference; it does not give a score, and does not pretend to.
• Word bank — Up to 24 words as one reflowing group of cards; tap a card to hear it. The panel has an Add from the dictionary box that appends a word with its pinyin and meaning rather than replacing what is there.
• Radical table — The Kangxi radicals of one stroke count, each tappable to be spoken, with example characters or meanings underneath.
• Pinyin table — Every final that one initial actually combines with — the real syllables, not the full grid with the impossible squares still in it.
• How it was made — One of the six 六书 character-formation categories, with worked examples. For the lesson where somebody asks *why* a character looks like that.
• Number — Digits up to 99,999, showing how the number is really said — including the counting form and the year reading where they differ.

Practice

• Match — Two shuffled columns of up to eight pairs. You choose which two of hanzi, pinyin and meaning become the cards, so the same list makes three different exercises.
• Build a sentence — Up to twelve words, scrambled into a bank the class taps into slots in order. Your typed order is the answer.
• Fill the blanks — A sentence with words removed in [square brackets]. Two modes: empty slots with a word bank to tap from, or the blanks simply hidden until you reveal them.
• Drop zone — A slot card: a prompt and a “+” when empty, or the answer when you have filled it in. Useful as the target of a question you ask aloud.
• Timer — A countdown with a caption and a bar, five seconds to an hour. Its controls keep working while you are presenting, because a timer you cannot start is decoration.
• Random picker — needs a seat — Cold-calls without replacement, from a list you type or from the class list of the circle you are presenting to. The names are never saved into the board.
• Scoreboard — needs a seat — Team names, one per line, with plus and minus buttons. The score follows the row, so renaming a team keeps its points.
• Quick check — needs a seat — A question and up to eight options the circle answers live. You can hold the answers back so the room sees only how many have replied, then reveal. Counts only — it never says who voted for what.

The two that are not in the list

• Content card — A reference to real platform content — a lesson section, a reading, a listening exercise, a grammar point, a culture article. Made by dragging a row out of the Content column; it resolves for each viewer under their own access.
• Dialogue — needs a seat — A lesson’s role-play script as a strip, with the ability to hide one speaker’s lines so the class supplies them. Comes from the Content column’s Dialogues tab, which a seat unlocks.

What none of them do

Worth knowing before you go looking, because every one of these is a reasonable thing to expect from a whiteboard.

• No text styling — No font size, no bold, no alignment, no colour on text. A Text widget has exactly one field. Size comes from how big you make the card.
• No rotation, and no free colour — Nothing rotates. Sticky notes have six papers and Shapes six inks, and those sets are closed — there is no colour picker.
• No copy and paste of a card — A whole slide duplicates; a single widget does not, and a card cannot be moved to another slide. Build the slide, then duplicate it.
• No multi-select — One card is selected at a time. To move several together, put them in a Section — or use Grid, Row, Column under *Arrange*, which lay out everything on the slide at once.
• No video, audio file or embed — There is no YouTube card, no audio upload and no iframe of any kind.
• Nothing scores a learner — Write it does not grade handwriting, Say it does not grade pronunciation, and Match keeps no tally. These are teaching instruments, not assessments — the marking happens in homework, against the real lesson.
• Ink is not a widget — Freehand drawing belongs to the slide, so it cannot be moved, resized, stacked or put in a Section. Draw it last.