[5th] Using Padlet to encourage the collaborative learning!!!

Collaborative learning refers to a situation where learners learn together through interaction with teachers and learners. Apart from only asking students to work together, there are massive tools to support teachers conveniently and efficiently enhancing interaction. Padlet is one of these tools.

If you want to explore this tool, click this link: https://padlet.com/dashboard.  

1.       What is the Padlet?

Padlet is software where teachers can initiate a question, and learners share their thoughts by posting words, links, drawings, videos etc. This software encourages collaboration in a supportive and straightforward way. Like the website itself said, ‘it does not tell you how to use but show you how to use.’ Now let me introduce some functions by presenting my pallet as an example.

This is my padlet link:https://padlet.com/1206406771/jvfyd2lvuh3eum09.

Different blanks to choose

Padlet offers you seven different blanks to use for a different purposes.

☺The most usual one is the ‘wall’ blank, where the content is randomly presented on the wall to read. Here, I choose this one, and my topic is discussing favourite dishes!

☺The other type of ‘timeline’ is placing the content along a horizontal line, which will be suitable for introducing the historical event.

☺While the type of ‘map’ is presented, the content on a map and be an initiative to teach the geography or event that happened in different places.

☺Other types like ‘shelf’ or ‘grid’ are beneficial to divide the content into several groups and be helpful to show the opposite ideas or different views.

Several options to decide on for one padlet.

👉  Title: You can type the title, description and icon for your padlet.

You can see my title is ‘my teaching padlet and the description is the question ‘what is your favourite dish?’ And I chose a smiling face as my icon.

👉  Appearance: here, you can choose the wallpaper, the font and the colour scheme

I choose the picture of cupcakes due to the relevance to my discussion topic and the font; the colour scheme is regular.

 👉Posting: here, you can choose the attribution, new post position, comments and reactions

I prefer not to display the author’s names since some students may be shy. Using the ‘first’ or ‘last’ button will allow you to decide where the new posts appear. Comments and reactions will enhance students’ motivation and engagement if students receive positive feedback. Moreover, teachers can use evaluation systems like ‘grade’ or ‘vote’ etc. This will be efficient for activities like debates voting.

Different forms to display the content.

👉Adding the photo

👉 Adding the video

👉 Adding the audio

👉 Adding the drawings

👉 Others like links, location

Here is my padlet using the first four forms:

2.       How is the padlet relevant to language teaching?

It encourages students to show ideas and enhances collaborative learning.

Firstly, students may not have confidence in expressing ideas, and writing the ideas and showing them through padlet offers many times to let them organise their language. Thus, it will motivate them to learn. Secondly, the anonymous function will also encourage shy students to present ideas because no one will know who the author is and make fun of their answers. At last, students will foster collaborative skills by discussing one topic together, presenting their thoughts in groups, evaluating others’ opinions or even debating in the padlet. In conclusion, it impacts students’ learning beneficially by accelerating collaborative work.  

 3.       Disadvantage

         👎Hard to organise

If students are encouraged individually to present their ideas, it will be hard for the teacher to organise the ideas and see them. This will be harder if the class contain 60 or 70 students.

👎Need equipment like phones or computers

Some students at school maybe not be allowed to use their phones or computers. In that case, this tool is not available for them.

 

4.       Application in my context

👀      Divide students into groups

Students should present ideas in different groups since the class will contain 60 or 70 students in my context. Otherwise, teachers can’t read the ideas one by one and neatly organise them.

 👀        Combine it with the TBLT (task-based learning )model

Teachers could initiate a discussion about how to solve a real-life problem or show opinions about a debating topic, where students could present their ideas on padlet.

👀   Combine it with CLIL( content and language integrated learning)

The blank of ‘time’ or ‘map’ will be helpful for students to learn history or geography. For instance, teachers could encourage students to list a vast event of a particular country in English to help learn the history, which the blank of ‘timeline’ will be helpful; teachers could also design a task requiring students to fill the country’s name into the map to learn geography and blank of ‘map’ will be helpful!

 

To sum up, the padlet is a functional tool that could be helpful for different language learning purposes. With the easy instructions and convenient functions, it will offer both teachers and students a new experience where students can learn collaborative skills, develop their cognitive ability and learn the language.