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Why the whiteboard freezes on school wifi, and how to fix it

The page loads, the video works, and the whiteboard does not move. This is the most common complaint in online tutoring and it is almost never the tutor's fault.

What is actually happening

A whiteboard needs a connection that stays open so a stroke can arrive the moment it is drawn. School and office networks routinely allow ordinary web pages and block exactly that kind of connection. The result is a page that looks fine, a call that works, and a board that is frozen, which is the worst of all worlds because nothing announces itself as broken.

How to tell

• Your student can see the board and hear you, but nothing they write reaches you.
• It works perfectly at home and fails from the school library.
• It fails on the school laptop and works on the same child's phone on mobile data.

That last one is the giveaway: mobile data is a different network, and if it works there, the network is the problem.

What Tutorboard does

It notices and moves the lesson onto an ordinary HTTPS path, which is the kind of request those networks already allow, and relays the call at the same time. You do not have to do anything; discovery takes a few seconds the first time.

If you already know a student is behind a school firewall, turn on School or work network in their settings. That stops the waiting: the lesson takes the reliable route in a second and a half rather than twelve. It is a hint about how long to wait, not a ban on the fast route, so the same student is quick again when they are at home in the holidays. You can turn it on and off in the middle of a lesson.

What to tell the family

Ask them to try mobile data once, as a test. If that fixes it, you know it is the school network and you can turn the setting on rather than spending ten minutes of a paid lesson guessing.

This comes up most with students taught in a school library at lunchtime: see what the rest of a lesson looks like for maths tutors, physics tutors and 11-plus tutors, or send your student the page written for them.