Padlet

I think one of my colleagues introduced Padlet to me years ago. I figured it was a useful tool! It is in a way an online noticeboard; you can invite people to post things there. It is a way of asking students for ideas, which become visible to everyone, and are anonymous if they want them to be. But somehow I never got around to using it.

Then one day I was preparing for a tutorial within the science communication module. I had decided that what I wanted to practice with the students was taking data from sources, and then incorporating it in to your own narrative. The risk is that students will just list the information from the sources in order, and not actually create their own narrative. I thought maybe I could have them try and do this on Padlet. We would be able to discuss everybody's contributions! And they could be anonymous, which I thought might help get responses.

I first had to make one. This was my debut! But it isn't complicated, so it worked. I sent the invitation to the students a few days before the tutorial.

During the actual tutorial, it worked like a treat! None of the students had issues accessing it, and they were all happy making contributions. And having them on the screen allowed us to discuss them all; what were the strengths and weaknesses of the various attempts?

I may use this more often! I have the free version, so I am a bit limited, but I quite like what this does. I suppose it is quite typical that I am getting onto this bandwagon quite late! But not quite never… 

My very exciting first Padlet