Three Effective Ways to Use Padlet as a Course Backchannel

Sample Padlet in Random format - Picture Source

Every teacher wants to know what each student is thinking, questioning, or misunderstanding during a lesson. Padlet.com is one way to find out. Simply create a new Padlet board and share the link with students at the beginning of class. Students may then double tap on the board to add any of the following during the lesson: a question, comment, key idea, link to a website, webpage, photo, video, song, document, article, or anything with a link.

This online bulletin board then becomes a collaborative source of student ideas on the topic of study. You may arrange comments in random fashion as pictured above, or change the layout to a stream or two column grid format where one comment follows the next in a column allowing easy access to questions being asked in real time.

Sample Padlet in Grid format - Picture Source

Following the lesson Padlet allows you to archive student responses in a variety of ways: share on your class social media page, save as a PDF or image, report individual posts in an Excel spreadsheet, embed into your blog or website, or create QR code to post and share (see photos below).

Three effective ways to use Padlet include:
1. Collaborative Project. Student groups can research a topic and post information to a single board. From this collection of links and information students can create a multimedia presentation on the topic. The presentation may also be posted to the Padlet. Visitors may access these presentations via the QR code created.
2. Formative and Summative Feedback. Ask an open ended question to begin the lesson and have students post all they know about the topic at Padlet. This background knowledge will inform instruction in the areas less known. During the lesson get feedback from every student to check understanding by asking a quick question. Or have each student write one question they have about content so far that you can answer as you teach. Summative feedback could be as simple as an exit question over a key idea.
3. Peer Sharing. Students can post a link to a writing or other assignment and receive feedback from others. With all samples posted at one site students learn from others and learn deeply as they provide feedback demonstrating understanding of requirements.

By opening a Padlet at the beginning of class and encouraging students to post resonses throughout the session you create a collaborative note taking and resource sharing location that can be archived for further access beyond the classroom. I encourage you to try Padlet as students arrive with devices!

Defining and Deciding Curriculum in the 21st Century

Information Doubling -picture credit

At a time when the amount of information in the world is doubling every 13 months (Schilling, 2013), and according to IBM, soon the “internet of things” will lead to the doubling of knowledge every 12 hours, how do we determine the most accurate source of content? Teachers today need to go beyond the textbook to include online sources of information being updated daily. 

Meaning online is derived in great part from visuals, increasing the need to incorporate multimedia into learning. Visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text, 90% of material transmitted to the brain is visual, and adding visual aids increases learning by up to 400% (Visual Teaching Alliance).

The Curriculum Handbook by Glatthorn, Carr, & Harris (2001) proposes eight types of curriculum from which educators select the material they will teach to meet standards. The recommended curriculum, the written curriculum, the supported curriculum, the tested curriculum, the taught curriculum, the learned curriculum, the hidden curriculum, and the excluded curriculum. Some points of view and controversial facts never make it into the taught curriculum, but advances in research allow these hidden and excluded items to appear in daily news. For example, today the Associated Press ran a story entitled, "DNA proves President Harding Fathered Child out of Wedlock." How does the effective teacher integrate new information not known or not included when textbooks were written?

Incomplete textbooks -picture credit

Open Source materials can help teachers infuse current visuals in their teaching to supplement text. Video sources such as YouTube, Teaching Channel, and National Science Foundation multimedia gallery. Students can follow developments as they happen in outer space at NASA's webstream  or around the world at Smithsonian's Giant Panda Cam or the Top Ten Wildlife Web Cams through Audobon. They can learn about news in real time through online news sources, allowing you time to discuss issues as you help students process incoming information.

Teaching students how to search for information on a topic from a variety of sources, evaluate sources, sythesize information, then create their own multimedia product to share their learning with the world, empowers them to add to the world's ever increasing body of knowledge.

Consider how you can incorporate research opportunities into your teaching so students can explore the wide variety of viewpoints and information sources available today, meeting standards of process and product, and then contribute their learning to add to our cumulative knowledge base.

Best wishes on the new school year! What curriculum will you decide on?