Padlet

Naomi Salmon

34 Padlet

Padlet Description

Padlet is an application that allows multiple contributors to post comments and media in a shared content window at the same time. In her Active Teaching Lab discussion of Padlet, Lauren Rose highlighted some of the advantages of the app. These include:

a platform that doesn’t require students to sign in to add content
a content window that auto-updates, meaning that all users can see others’ posts as they enter them (without refreshing their browser windows)
the option to post text, hyperlinks, audio, or video content

Padlet as a short-term blended learning resource:

Padlet may be a useful resource for instructors who would like to include a large number of students in an activity at once, but it should be viewed as a short-term, web-only resource rather than long-term component to include in a text.

As with all other iframe content that is hosted on a third party platform, it’s not safe to assume that your media content or embedded address will remain stable over time. It’s best to have a plan for how to convert the materials your students have gathered into a more stable and/or print-friendly format after your initial activity is complete.

STEP 1: In-Class

Literature Mix-Tape Activity

Instructions:

Today’s class warm-up invites you to think outside of the box. Together with your group members, choose a scene in Pride and Prejudice. Next, pick one song (from any genre) that you feel captures the emotions or themes of this scene. Provide a brief description of the incident as well as a page number for reference.

OER Sourcebook contributors: feel free to join in! What song would you add to a literary playlist of this type?

STEP 2: Content Conversion

Once student group members collaborate to create a Pride and Prejudice playlist, the instructor for this class might collect the titles and artists of each group’s songs and organize them in order of each scene’s appearance in the novel. From there, the instructor could incorporate this completed playlist into the course Pressbook as a stable, self-contained resource within the Pressbooks chapter.

In this way, the students’ creative contributions would be preserved even if the embedded content were to disappear because of an unanticipated change in Padlet’s platform.

Additional Applications: Collecting Student Advice for Future Peers

In a Twitter exchange about fostering a supportive student community, Laura Gibbs described using Padlet as a tool for collecting advice from students to their peers. She writes: “my experience is that when you ask the students to reflect in the context of giving advice to future students, they are really thoughtful and also very specific in their observations.”

Padlet embedded into a Canvas page and filled with snippets of advice from students to other students — Laura Gibbs’s Padlet page for student-contributed advice (shared with permission).

An embedded Padlet page in a collaborative Open Pedagogy project or a student writing manual could be a tool for gathering similar content in an anonymous and immediate way. Instructors who were interested in doing so could then incorporate this advice into the main body of an OER text.

License

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