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Most of the time developers make extensive use of software tools in a software development process to support them in their day-to-day work. One of the first and most important phases is the design phase. Here tools are missing which support the creative and collaborative workflow (parallel/distributed). At the moment software designers uses classic whiteboards in team meetings to express their ideas. Subsequently a coworker uses a mobile phone or a camera to take photos of the work and remodel the picture with a modeling tool. That process is very inconvenient, error-prone and hinders a creative modeling cycle. For overcoming this ineffective process this paper shows a new approach to use digital whiteboards to transform free hand sketches in formal models and back again while modeling in a distributed team. The approach is completely independent from a pre-defined modeling language. It provides an interactive training mode to learn new graphical syntax elements and map these elements to formal metamodel entities. Based on the approach a collaborative sketch and modeling infrastructure was implemented.