5 Ideas to Use Padlet Effectively

A lot of faculty either worry or struggle with student engagement in their live session or asynchronous classrooms. Oftentimes, introducing a new tool to include in your lesson plans can be a great way to engage students and allow them to be creative in how they participate. Padlet is a great new tool to learn for educators and learners alike, both synchronously or asynchronously depending on how educators want to use this tool. It is a great tool for collaboration among groups, the whole class, or it can also be used by individual students in a variety of ways.

The tool is intuitive and has a great UI/UX design, catering to learning environments. You can create different padlets and share them
using a code, akin to any cloud-based documents. Educators and learners alike can create them ahead of time, and have access to them afterwards as long as they have their own padlet account. Signing up for Padlet is FREE and seamless if you already have access to a google account.

In the below graphic, note the different formats and different uses:

Here are five ways to utilize Padlet if you are just starting out:

1. Using different forms of Padlet as a submission for student assignments. Using Padlet allows creative students to submit outlines, reflections, and brainstorms in the form of a Padlet. The student can share the link with you when ready, and you can set it up so that feedback can be left on Padlets.

2. Using the “Wall” Padlet as a collaborative whiteboard is effective, fun and creative. The Zoom whiteboard has been updated this past summer but Padlet is still superior in most ways for collaboration. For example, at the beginning of the semester, you can collaboratively create community and class guidelines together using this feature.

3. Padlet can also be a great way to provide a timeline of assignments attached with guidelines and FAQs from students. Using the “timeline” Padlet, you can display assignments, expectations, due dates and map it for the whole term. This document/shareable link can be used term after term if you are teaching the same class.

4. Providing resources-based on topics throughout the asynchronous weeks of your section. Here is an example of how our Instructional Development team organized a “shelf” Padlet of ed tech tools for our faculty.

5. If you are teaching a group of students who are located in different geographical areas you can utilize the “Map” feature to collaboratively show where everyone is located. This could be a great warm-up or icebreaker activity to administer at the beginning of the term.

If you would like to learn more about these tools in person, we provide Community of Practice sessions on a bi-weekly basis where we explore tools such as these, and strategize as a faculty community on how to effectively utilize them!