How to Create a Collaborative Drawing Room in pairPaint

What does a collaborative drawing room consist of?

The simplest method of drawing together online in pairPaint is to use a collaborative drawing room. Someone creates the room and receives a short code; all the people who enter that code take part in the same live session from anywhere, directly through the browser. Unlike traditional MS Paint — which has always been a solitary, single-player programme — the rooms in pairPaint are designed for groups: for example, a teacher working with her class, children drawing with their grandparents who are across the country, or friends doodling together after school.

Since pairPaint is a free online painting application, there is no need to purchase seats, no need to create accounts, and no need to install an app. As long as your students can open a web page, they will be drawing together in less than a minute.

How to create a room in 5 steps

It takes less than a minute to create a room; the precise sequence is as follows:

Open the Classroom. In the pairPaint toolbar, click on the people icon — that icon leads to the Classroom panel, which is the place where all the room features are located.

Enter your name so that the students and friends who see the room will know who created it.

A password can be included (optional). Rooms are private by default in that only those who have your code can join; however, a password provides an additional barrier, which is useful in classrooms during exams.

Select a mode — if you want everyone to work on a single shared canvas choose Open mode, or if you want to give each student their own canvas while you keep an eye on them select Creator mode. (Further details on the difference are given below.)

Click on Create room and pairPaint will give you a 5-letter room code. Tap the code to copy it and then read it aloud, write it on the board, or enter it into your class chat.

That's all there is to it — the room is now live. When people join, their names show up in your panel and the drawing starts right away.

Should you choose open mode or creator mode?

The two modes are there since the meaning of drawing together online varies from group to group.

Open mode is the best painting application if you want to draw on the same image together since it provides one large shared canvas on which all the participants draw at the same time. It's ideal for a class mural, a brainstorming web, a group comic strip, or a family game based on collaborative drawing. Whenever the teacher finishes the session, each student's individual canvas retains a copy of the shared drawing attached to it — thus ensuring that no one leaves with nothing.

Creator mode is the superior application for both teachers and students when it comes to drawing, and it is probably the best painting app to use in an educational setting. Each student is given their own canvas, and the teacher's panel shows live thumbnails of all the students' work as they are creating it. You can click on any card to view a student drawing at full size, enable 'Draw on canvas' so that you can give your feedback directly on their work, pause any student who needs to listen, or remove a guest who has accidentally entered. Additionally, you can press 'Send my canvas to all' in order to give every student the same initial frame — for example, a warm-up sketch, a graph-paper template, or a prompt for them to respond to.

As a rule of thumb, select Open mode during together-time and Creator mode during lesson-time.

How students and friends join a room

Joining is deliberately simpler than creating:

You can open pairPaint on any device — such as a Chromebook, an iPad, a phone, or a PC — provided it has a browser.

Click on the people icon and then select 'Join room'.

Enter the five-letter room code and their own name.

Also enter the password if there is one for the room.

They join — they're in and starting the live broadcast along with everyone else.

There are no accounts, no installations, and no email addresses; and with the classroom tablets that are shared, a student can simply choose 'Rejoin room' in order to join a previous session rather than having to look for the code once more.

What the room creator can do

Creating the room makes you its host, and the host gets the full classroom toolkit:

Watch it all as it happens. As soon as the students' canvases start to stream into your panel they appear as thumbnails and are updated in real time, which means you can tell who is stuck without having to go down the aisles.

Give feedback directly by selecting a student's card, turning on 'Draw on canvas', and then using the full toolbox to sketch in guidance, corrections, or a star of encouragement directly on their work, including the ability to add text with a font selector and rotation so that your annotations look neat.

Distribute the starting frames. Draw the instructions or give an example on your own canvas and then press 'Send my canvas to all' so that every student gets the same page at the same time.

Maintain order by pausing a student if they need to listen or by getting someone out of the room at any time.

Let students work together in a safe way. It is not possible for students to draw on each other's canvases without being invited, but they can ask to draw and the person receiving the request can choose to either allow or decline it. When a request is accepted, a shared draw-over is opened up with the full set of tools, so that peer assistance remains consensual.

Gather the work by pressing Download PDF, which will collect all of the students' canvases into a single PDF with each one given a named page. When you open the canvas in Open mode, the shared canvas is saved.

Finish and rejoin. Once the class is over, tap End room — afterwards you can return to the same room at any time by using Rejoin room.

Is the drawing room suitable for children?

The rooms are set up to be private. To gain access you must know your 5-letter code — along with your password if you've chosen one — and the host can at any time suspend the drawing or remove anybody they want. There is no public lobby, no random pairing up, and no personal data is collected: since there are no accounts, no names, emails or profiles are stored anywhere.

The drawings remain on the local storage of each device unless the owner decides to export them or takes part in a room. In the case of classrooms, this represents a sensible approach to privacy since the school never uploads the students' artwork to a server just in order to carry out a lesson.

Room ideas for teachers, parents and friends

Teachers can use pairPaint, which is a free online whiteboard featuring graph paper — they should select the graph paper style and then carry out a maths lesson on the common canvas, with the students working through the problems in Creator mode. To write out vocabulary, use the text tool; to highlight important points, use the highlighter, and for exit tickets, use the option to send your canvas to all: just give out a prompt, gather all the responses into a single PDF, and that's it.

For parents, set up a room with grandparents who live in a different city and have the grandchildren teach them the sticker library. Alternatively, obtain free coloring worksheets from freekidworksheets.com, copy one of them as a starting template, and have the entire family colour the same page together using a video call.

Organise drawing challenges — this could be a 5-minute monster mash-up in which each person adds one feature to a common creature when the session is in Open mode, or a comic relay in which each person draws one panel and the host then puts the PDF together at the end.

Frequently asked questions