What is Padlet?

Padlet, in case you aren’t aware, is a fantastic live posting board you can utilize with your students or colleagues to collect, curate, interact, and comment on anything from documents, posts, ideas, or web links.  All this collaboration happens in real-time, and anyone can access it from anywhere as long as they have the link to your Padlet. We use this for “parking lot” discussions during trainings, allowing participants to share questions, ideas, or concerns during a session. This way, if you’re in a training with us and a questions pops in your head while we’re in the middle of covering something important, you can throw it into Padlet, so you don’t forget about it. We then take time to address everything on the Padlet. We also bring in our entire team, digitally. So even when Tiffany (@techieteachott) is not at a training, she can be helping teachers with questions, and sharing ideas in real-time with them. It’s been a truly awesome tool for us.

That’s how we utilize Padlet during trainings, but what we’ve found is that teachers all over the country are utilizing this awesome tech tool to do a lot of really great things in their classrooms. Let’s look at 5 ways you can utilize Padlet in your classroom to increase engagement and accountability.

Formative Assessment

Formative Assessment is a great way to utilize Padlet. Whether you are trying to figure out if your students understood a lesson, or you just want to check in and see if they remember content, you can create a single Padlet site that gets reused daily, or a new Padlet site for each individual assessment. Students can participate live or you can use the built-in moderator settings to approve answers, posting them when you are ready to release them to the public “board.” Either way allows for great discussion of student responses and identification of misconceptions. This can greatly enhance any teachers ability to review, comment on, and quickly measure student understanding using.

The real-time interaction opens the door to so many possibilities, and we've found that it is a great tool for all classrooms, especially those that are mastery-based. Click To Tweet

Group Projects

Padlet is also a great way to help students collaborate. Each group can create their own Padlet site to curate and collect their progress and work. It can then be accessed by you, so that you have a source for live updates on student progress and work. An additional benefit is that you can track who is posting to the project site and evaluate individual contributions to the final product and process very easily. This is a great way to encourage discussion or reflect on project progress with the entire class. Have groups provide “status updates” and use the Padlet to the allow the entire class to share ideas and collaborate with other groups.

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Class Discussions

Facilitating classroom discussions can be difficult. Making sure everyone is participating, keeping the conversation on track, and keeping students engaged can be challenging. Padlet can help with all of these by holding students accountable and keeping them engaged in the process. By creating a Padlet site you can have your students post their talking points, ideas, and feedback during the discussion LIVE, or potentially prior to the discussion.

This helps ensure that everyone gets to provide input, even if during the discussion they choose not to vocalize a response or idea. This also makes “grading” the discussion and student input much easier! Another great idea is to call out positive ideas / thoughts to increase engagement. Because the discussion is live, it makes a normal class discussion much more interactive and engaging for both the teacher and students.

Parent Communication

Creating a parent focused Padlet is a great way to engage all stakeholders. You can share the link at the beginning of the year and create a running log of discussions and reflections. It’s also great for any announcements or events that you’d like to communicate to parents. You can also share feedback and additional support for students after they’ve left your room. And it’s a great way to send out reminders as well! Parents can also share thoughts, ideas, and even concerns with you, so you can stay aware of any changes that may need to change in your classroom.

Padlet is just one of many awesome tech tools out there, but it’s simplicity, intuitiveness is really nice. The real-time interaction opens the door to so many possibilities, and we’ve found that it is a great tool for all classrooms, especially those that are mastery-based. Check out Padlet here!