New: Follow Collaborators and Gather Everyone to Your Slide

Written by Greg Ives

Creator of Jotboard

Two new real-time collaboration features are now live in Jotboard: follow any collaborator to track their slide navigation, and — if you’re the board owner — gather everyone to your current slide instantly.

Real-time collaboration in Jotboard just got more coordinated. Two new features make it easier to stay in sync with the people on your board — whether you’re following along with a presenter or bringing a whole class to the same slide.

Follow a collaborator

When several people are working on the same board, it’s easy to end up on different slides. The new follow feature lets you lock your view to another collaborator’s. As they navigate, you navigate with them — no need to track what they’re doing or ask “which slide are you on?”

To follow someone, click the avatar stack in the top-right corner of the board to open the collaborators panel, then click Follow next to their name. Their avatar will move to the front of the stack with a pulsing ring so you always know who you’re following.

Following stays active until you navigate manually — clicking a slide in the sidebar, using the arrow buttons, or adding a new slide all resume your independent navigation.

Gather everyone (board owners)

If you’re running a session and want everyone’s attention on one slide, the new Gather everyone button does exactly that. Open the collaborators panel and click the button at the bottom — everyone currently on the board will be brought to your slide immediately. Anyone who gets gathered sees a brief notification so they know what happened.

This is only available to the board owner. It’s designed for moments like introducing a new activity, calling attention to a specific slide during a lesson, or keeping a workshop on track when participants have wandered ahead.

Why these features matter

Jotboard is built around the same simple, slide-based format as Google Jamboard, and most of the time that’s exactly what you need: people working side by side without any ceremony. But there are moments — at the start of a class, during a debrief, when you want to show something specific — where you need everyone looking at the same thing at the same time. These two features cover those moments without getting in the way of everything else.

Both features are live now for all Jotboard users.