Hi ​@barncrow 

Well, I am not entirely sure of what you want to do - but in my case when I work with students remotely via MS Teams, I tend to share my screen showing the board - but naturally everyone in the board can make changes at the same time, including me. Wouldn’t that work? Cheers, Ken

Thanks Kenneth!  You’re right, the whiteboard is fantastic for most things!  And the new Video Calls feature even has real screen-sharing now.  I would really like to leave Zoom for Miro at this point.

However, Zoom seems to have a couple of important features Miro does not.  Here’s a typical case to illustrate my need:  Susie (a remote client) wants us to review some questions from her SAT practice test.  So, she logs into the College Board’s software, shares her screen, and we proceed to discuss the questions.  Zoom has a feature (see image below) that allows Susie and I to both write directly on the screen-share.  I find this very useful!

Absent that feature, the best I can do is to take screen captures from Susie’s screen-share, paste them to the whiteboard, and then bring Susie back to the whiteboard so we can annotate there.  It’s clunky.

And so, I’m asking if there’s either 1) a way to duplicate this useful feature within Miro, or 2) a website external to Miro that might provide the same functionality.

Hmmm . . . if you mean the challenge is TAKING content that is not in Miro (like an exam) and then PUTTING it in Miro (like via a screenshot/copy/paste) . . . I guess you’ll pretty much have that challenge even if you use other tools - unless you go directly with screensharing and annotations in Zoom.  An advantage of Miro is naturally then SAVING this data in an organized approach, maybe to create a portfolio or a record of results over the semester for each student.

Yeh, that’s pretty much the conclusion I’ve come to.  I’m just trying to make sure I haven’t missed some other option for annotating directly on a client’s shared screen.  I’d really like to leave Zoom entirely at this point, but that one feature is holding me back.

Hi ​@barncrow 

Thanks for the detailed explanation! At this time, Miro’s Video Calls feature does include screen sharing but doesn't support real-time, multi-user annotation directly on a participant’s shared screen, like Zoom does. Alternatively, you can Use Miro as the shared canvas and have your client take a screenshot or export content (like an SAT question) and upload it directly into a shared Miro board. You can both annotate and discuss in real time on top of that content, and everything is saved automatically.

Hi again ​@barncrow 👋

Just adding more context here: screen annotations work in Zoom because it’s a native app that can draw directly over your screen. Since Miro Video Calls run in the browser (for most users), we can’t enable that kind of direct interaction due to browser security limitations.

That said, this is something the team is aware of, and it’s a feature we could explore in the future, especially for the Miro desktop app. For now, uploading screenshots into a shared board is the best workaround for collaborative markup.

Thank you Eca!  I have entered this feature as a wish-list idea.

For what it’s worth, Zoom is currently able to pull off the “annotate shared screens” trick even in the browser client.  No idea what technical voodoo is under the hood there.

I like where Video Calls is headed...thank you guys for all the hard work!