Tuesday 31 March 2015

Padlet

Used Padlet with my Social Studies class yesterday. I love how quickly they pick up things and just go with it!

At first the getting them online and onto the wall took a while but that can be sped up if I just have the link set up on our class site for them to access faster. Or make it a shortened url...

I had to remember quickly how it was that you used Padlet - but then a quick tutu and double tap on the grey wall and we were off.

At first students were just writing a couple of words to answer the question. Eventually I got them to start adding their name to each answer as well. Only a few silly comments and I realised I could just delete those anyway after reminding them it wasn't appropriate. I wonder if there's a way to find out who wrote what from my side.

What I'd like to be able to do is add feedforward comments on their comment or even get them to be able to conmect their ideas together like how we do with hexagons...

Asked my students to start putting longer and more in depth comments up and pushed it further by saying I was looking for class dojo points as well for the best answers and class participation.

Some of my students were getting annoyed that one of my students was taking something straight off of wikipedia. I said it was ok as long as he had the reference there and his name on the comment too. Soon enough everyone else was scrambling and Nathan was feeling pretty chuffed with himself that he'd started the mass onslaught of source grabbing to answer the question.

I said to the class to find relevant information - a student said that that would be too hard because they'd have to read it first... so we still need to work on that issue. Maybe the next topic we do we'll get some books from the National Library and we'll learn how to sift through info quickly.

I asked the class how come none of them had put pictures up yet to answer the question.

A group of my students asked how to spell the words on Auschwitz's main gate - Arbeit Macht Frei - Work Makes One Free. They found a cool picture to add onto the wall later too.

I was pretty happy with how it was all going. The time pressure helped as did the carrot of dojo points.

I wonder how good it would have worked had we not had technical issues with the computer playing the rest of Schindlers List.  Either way - we set up another wall prior to watching the rest of SL and they began adding comments about what they noticed from the film. I was going to tell them about TodaysMeet.com as well but figured that we already nailed one tool and I didn't want them to get overwhelmed or distracted by the new tool rather than focus on the rest of the film.

As it was - we only had a tiny bit of time left to watch the film and it was the beginning of the transfer to Auschwitz. Really important so we decided to finish watching it next lesson.

Hopefully we can use Padlet more often. Was a fabulous learning opportunity and perhaps I should have done exit tickets on the use of it and what they enjoyed about it and how they think it helped with their learning.

Next period we'll go over it. :)

Love this class!!!

Here's our Padlet wall links too :)


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