Tool Evaluation #1

Padlet: Collaboration Tool

Type of Software: application, to create an online bulletin board

Cost: try it free for 30 days, Teachers monthly payment of $12 including 

unlimited student accounts or teachers plan annual $99 

Primary User: Teachers or students, and businesses

Features:

  • Gives automatic access to lessons and plans that have been created, allowing for administrators and teachers to see students work.
  • Allows you to create notes onto a digital board.
  • Easy to use, with 29 different language options.
  • Work with others easily with your sharing link
  • Supports almost all file types allowing you to post images, videos, music, files from photoshop, YouTube videos, twitter, and 400 more apps.
  • Privacy is available with the choice between making it public, secret, password protected, totally private, and organization-wide. You can also make a custom setting regarding who can view and edit your board.
  • Round the clock support is also available

Information from: https://padlet.com/features

Prerequisites:

  • Using Padlet in the classroom is very easy. You can access it from its app on both Apple and Android devices or use its website.
  • Its features are very easy to use which means any students with experience in any sort of technology can successfully use Padlet

Intuitiveness:

  • Blogging is intuitive
  • Site is intuitive
  • Setup is intuitive

Alternative:

  • Dotstorming which was built for people to share ideas in the form of digital sticky notes and then vote for their favorite ideas.
  • A free account allows you to have three topic boards at a time.
  • The paid account ($5/month) gives you unlimited access.
  • There is also a school-wide pricing plan.

Here you will find a video on how to use Dotstorming  https://youtu.be/eTDbzdIC0BM

Benefits:

  • Students can get feed back on their boards and notes that they post.
  • The feedback is received quicker, which saves time.
  • It’s an extremely easy-to-use tool that allows learners to collaborate online and share images, links, documents, videos and voice recordings.
  • Allows students to be engaged contribute to the class.
  • Its good for lecture style teaching.
  • Automatically saves your work as you are doing it.

Information from: https://thedigitalteacher.com/reviews/padlet

Drawbacks:

  • Disadvantage in math classes (answers are more time consuming).
  • There’s the possibility that students could post content that’s inappropriate or filled with errors, resulting in their peers seeing them

Information from: https://www.commonsense.org/education/website/padlet

Tips:

  • Make your edits/modifications to your board before you begin posting
  • This is a visual tool, therefore when creating your goal should be to make it visually appealing.

Overall Conclusion:

Looking at the Triple E Framework, Padlet is beneficial in engagement, enhancement, and extension. I think it scores very high in all categories, making me mostly likely wanting to use it in my future classroom.

Engagement: this type of technology allows for students to be engaged in their work with all its features and custom attributes. It is very hands on and promotes social engagements between students and the teacher through comments and likes on their notes.

Enhancement: the visual aspects of the tools allow for concepts and new ideas to be better understood. As well as their posts showing what they have learned in their own unique way.

Extension: it allows for communication and feedback skills to be improved through each posts that the students make. This can help students in organizing their ideas and thoughts outside of the classroom and applying it to other aspects of their life.

Possible Uses:

1. Bell ringer activity — Ask students what they remember from the previous day’s lesson. This can help in evaluating what still needs to be taught and as a review on content for the students.

2. Collaborative notetaking — While listening to a speaker students can work together to add notes to a Padlet to produce a resource they can refer to later.

3. Exit ticket — Ask questions such as, What did you learn today? What didn’t make sense? What questions do you still have?

4. Research resource gathering — Students and groups can create their own individual Padlets to hold ideas and sources for research. This can prevent them losing important papers and everyone will have access even if someone’s absent that day.

Information from: http://ditchthattextbook.com/2014/11/03/20-useful-ways-to-use-padlet-in-class-now/

Here is a video of a kindergarten teacher demonstrating how to use Padlet in the classroom. Showing that at the age as young as 6 students can use this app shows its easily access. https://youtu.be/HCE-FUPlFWE