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Ed Tech

There's a good chance you've done the "write on a sticky note and put it on the wall" activity - or have seen it happen before.
Padlet lets those sticky notes have images, links and videos AND be available with practically any Internet-ready device.
It used to be blocked by my school's Internet filter. This school year, the powers that be have allowed it through on student devices, opening up lots of possibilities in class!

Padlet is a great place for gathering ideas, sharing them and modifying them later. It's like a living, breathing webpage. Users can add links, YouTube videos, files and images to Padlet notes. They can move and arrange them. A link to a Padlet can be shared and Padlets can be embedded into webpages.

Here are 20 ways to use Padlet in class:

15. Collect videos to share in class

Looking for FREE Tech Like A PIRATE resources?
You'll find a treasure trove of additional ideas and activities related to t ​ ​​​​he book at TechLikeAPirate.com!

Looking for some more ideas? These sites have them!
Do you have an idea of how you could use Padlet in class? Post it in a comment below!

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20 useful ways to use Padlet in class now

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Padlet is a web app that lets users post notes on a digital wall. The uses for this site in the classroom are virtually endless!There's a good chance

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Actively Engaging Students in Asynchronous Online Classes.pdf

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National Council of Teachers of English

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Reading and writing texts online are basic skills that students need to be literate citizens in today's world. Teaching with blogs provides the opportunity to engage students in both of these literacy activities, and the strategy has the additional benefit of enabling students to publish their writing easily and to share their writing with an authentic audience.

When students write entries and comment on the entries of their peers, blogs become an integral part of a lively literacy community. Students can post on such topics as journal/diary entries, reflections on their writing process, details on their research projects, commentary on recent events or readings, and drafts for other writing they are doing.

Once a student posts an entry, others in the class can respond, provide supportive feedback, and offer additional suggestions or perspectives. By writing and commenting on blogs, students write for real readers (not just for their teachers). As a result, students focus on clear communication and get immediate feedback on whether they communicate effectively.

Check out these additional resources for teaching with blogs:

Weekly Writer's Blogs: Building a Reflective Community of Support
Students explore the conventions of blog writing while using it to self-reflect on their writing and communicate with classmates about one another's reflections.

Creating Character Blogs
Students view examples of blogs, learn the basic elements of blog creation, and then create a blog from the perspective of a fictional character.

Using Microblogging and Social Networking to Explore Characterization and Style
Students use social networking sites to trace the development of characters by assuming the persona of a character on a class site and sending a set number of tweets, or status updates.

What Would Ben, Tom, and George Think? Blogging about the American Revolution
After researching famous people of the American Revolution, students take on the identities of these Patriots and Loyalists. Students then participate in a blog, writing responses about events leading up to and during the American Revolutionary War.

Blog about Courage Using Photos
Engage teens in this activity in which they use photographs to examine and write about courage on a blog.

The Blog of Anne Frank?: Taking on Social Roles through Online Writing
Anne Frank shared her experiences through a private diary that became public as a book. In this lesson, students will consider how writing creates social identities as they blog about a political issue.

Create a Career Blog
This activity invites children and teens to explore various careers and then write about what they might want to be when they grow up in a blog.

Blogtopia: Blogging about Your Own Utopia
Students work together to create their own utopias, using blogs as the primary source of publication.

Blogging in the Primary Grades? Yes, Indeed!
Give students an authentic reason to read and write by researching blogs written by their peers around the world and then writing their own.

How else do you use blogs with students?

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education software edtech "formative assessment" "active learning" "student voice" "personalized learning" "google for edu" "microsoft education" "student engagement" "interactive presentation" "engaging lessons" "creative lessons" classroom student engagement nearpod flipgrid "google slides" powerpoint school

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With Pear Deck, create interactive lessons and assessments to engage every student. Find out what an active classroom looks like at www.peardeck.com.

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Book Creator - Love Learning - Book Creator app

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Teachers love it. Students love it. Book Creator is the simplest, most inclusive way to create content in the classroom.

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Flipgrid created a resource page for remote learning

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Flipgrid created a resource page for remote learning

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We express ourselves in different ways. On Flip, you can use our simple and fun built-in camera to record your thoughts, add effects and share within your Flip group as video, audio only or text in your web browser or mobile app.

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Flip is a video discussion and sharing app, free from Microsoft.

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Flip (formerly Flipgrid) is a video discussion and video sharing app, free from Microsoft, built for classrooms and beyond. Learn more.

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9 New Ways to Use Flipgrid in the Classroom

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The popular tool has features that teachers in any subject can use to help students connect with each other and share their learning.

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Flipgrid is a free video discussion platform from Microsoft that helps millions of educators across the world hear from their learners anytime and anywhere. To use Flipgrid, educators post discussion prompts and learners respond with short videos.

Flipgrid is the perfect way to maintain your class environment and keep learners engaged from anywhere. To get started, first create your free educator account at flipgrid.com. Then, follow the steps below:

1. Create your first Grid. Your Grid is for your class. If you're teaching multiple classes, you can create multiple Grids.

2. Select a Grid type. Choose the "School Email" Grid type and add your school's email domain. This is how your learners will access the Grid.

3. Add Topics. These are your discussion prompts. Create your own for anything you would like your learners to discuss, or explore thousands of topic templates in Flipgrid's Disco Library.

4. Share with learners. Share your Grid's unique link or code with your learning community. Students join the discussion by clicking the link on a computer or entering your Grid's code in our free iOS and Android apps.

Ideas for engaging with college students:

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Higher Ed Remote Learning with Flipgrid - Flipgrid

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Flipgrid is a free video discussion platform from Microsoft that helps millions of educators across the world hear from their learners anytime and anywhere. To use Flipgrid, educators post discussion prompts and learners respond with short videos. Flipgrid is the perfect way to maintain your class environment and keep learners engaged from anywhere.

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The thought ended almost before it started: "This is so overwhelming." It was all one teacher managed to type before she stopped short, vexed into silence, perhaps, by the sheer size of the problem. In the pregnant pause that followed, undoubtedly, every teacher tracking the unspooling thread-about the dizzying, rapidly escalating viral crisis that was closing schools across the country-recognized the chasm they were all facing as well, and took a deep breath.

In the next few hours, over 500 teachers joined two Facebook conversations about teaching during the coronavirus pandemic, spilling out their concerns and anxieties: What will we do if the schools close for months? How can I shift to online learning if we're closing tomorrow, or even in a few hours? How will special education students be cared for, and IEPs administered? What about children who have no internet access, or who will be required, as Keith Schoch thoughtfully noted, to "become de facto babysitters" for their brothers and sisters. "There is no digital divide, but there is a digital abyss, and America's rural poor are living at the bottom of it," said Anne Larsen, with devastating concision. What if, in the end, the school systems decide that online learning is working just fine, and never reopen?

The panic was all perfectly understandable.

But there were plenty of teachers in the mix who had weeks of crisis experience under their belts by that time-several in Hong Kong and Italy and the state of Washington, for example-and others who had long careers in online and distance learning. In the end, too, there were many fantastic, highly creative teachers providing strategies as fast as the obstacles appeared.

At the highest level, a shift in mindset would be required-even the most optimistic educators conceded the point. There are plenty of strategies and tactics we're covering at Edutopia-and we'll continue to-but here are the crucial emotional and psychological scaffolds that our audience agreed would be needed to teach in this new paradigm.

Expect Trial... and Plenty of Error

Start by being reasonable with yourself. It is, in fact, impossible to shift to distance learning overnight without lots of trial and error. Expect it, plan for it, and do your best to make peace with it.

"I can tell you, now that we're in week 7 of online learning, that much of what you will do will be trial and error," wrote Stacy Rausch Keevan, who was teaching in Hong Kong. "Don't stress about that-it won't do you any good. For my middle school English and humanities classes, I'm offering the same lessons I would normally do live, but in smaller doses."

Acknowledge the Extraordinary

Reset your baseline. We're all operating in the shadow of a global pandemic, and it is disorienting and limiting. Business as usual is unrealistic.

The real "points to consider" are not "the strict adherence to 'regular' conditions and norms," wrote Amy Rheault-Heafield in a reply to a question about how to structure distance learning like more typical learning experiences, "but how to provide a rich experience to all learners who are now without 'traditional' teachers standing beside them in classes."

So while you should try to provide "meaningful activities," cautioned elementary teacher John Thomas, "we should remember that on short notice-and because many of us have limited PD utilizing these tools-we can't tackle everything immediately. In other words, we should give ourselves the time and the permission to figure this out."

Reduce the Workload (for Yourself and Your Students)

If your district allows it, you should plan to do less. Students won't be able to work as productively, anyway-so if you can't scale back you'll be sending them work they cannot do-and your own life and family need added care.

"Feedback from students and families over the last 10 days in Italy is 'less is more,'" commented Jo Gillespie. "Consider that parents are trying to work from home, and siblings are vying for computer and Wi-Fi time. Try Google quizzes using Forms, a reading log, some short live sessions with teachers and classmates, maybe vocabulary extension, maths and geometry problems (but not too many). And that's probably enough."

And Keevan, the teacher in Hong Kong with weeks of experience, confirmed that time and distance play funny games during a crisis: "What would normally take you one class period to teach in the classroom will probably take you twice as long."

No Person Is an Island

Humans are social animals. Working from home, or worse, from quarantine, is isolating and often depressing for both teachers and students.

Make a concerted effort to speak to other colleagues and trusted professionals to provide emotional and psychological context to your work. Teaching at this moment is extraordinarily hard, and you'll need the virtual company of people who are experiencing what you are.

And don't forget to "reach out to students as often as you can," said Keevan, who still teaches classes live despite a (slightly inconvenient!) 13-hour time difference. Or you can facilitate peer-to-peer communication. John Thomas assigns pen pals in his first- and second-grade classes, so that kids with no internet can feel like they belong.

Everyone Thinks They Can't-Before They Can

Some degree of pessimism and self-doubt comes with the territory. Teachers in the Facebook thread advised more perspective-taking and being more patient with yourself: You know how to teach, and you will figure this out in time.

"We are in week 7 and I have three children of my own at home," wrote Salecia Host, a teacher in Tianjin, China, reflecting on the arc of her emotional response to the crisis. "Just take it day by day. It gets less overwhelming and more routine."

Try to remain calm-though you'll have a few moments where that goes out the window-and keep plugging away: "Being open-minded and flexible is key," said Kaz Wilson, who also works in China. "Everyone thinks you can't until you pause, talk it out with folks who are doing it, and know that you'll get through it."

Mind the Gap

Your work will be hard, but there are students facing more severe challenges. Students with no internet or no computer will need support, as will those with learning differences or other circumstances that make distance learning especially difficult. Supporting these students was on almost everyone's mind-it came up dozens of times in the Facebook thread.

"I'm in Italy. Our schools closed a few weeks ago without any previous warning. We shifted to online immediately. It is hard and exhausting," admitted Eleonora Borromeo, before providing a ray of hope. "Equity is an issue. Assessment is an issue. But the students are doing their best and giving us the strength to go on."

Solutions from our audience of teachers focused on the old analog approaches: paper-and-pencil tasks, workbooks and activity packets that can be mailed home, and updating parents and students via phone calls daily.

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Teaching Through a Pandemic: A Mindset for This Moment

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The thought ended almost before it started: "This is so overwhelming." It was all one teacher managed to type before she stopped short, vexed into silence, perhaps, by the sheer size of the problem.

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I am fond of and am a big advocate of all of the GSuite tools. However, my favorite tool is Padlet! Padlet is the hub, the home page, the museum of digital artifacts posted from many artists. I 💗 Padlet!

New Features

Did you know that added some new features this past May? Before the update, you could choose to display your responses in three ways with: free-form, grid, or stream. I noticed that Padlet changed the name of free-from to canvas and you can link posts to each other with connecting arrows, so creating a flowchart or organizational chart will be that much easier: helpful for linking timeline events, life cycles and so much more. I can not wait to use that feature this fall. You can still choose those three layouts or the new features called wall or shelf.

Using the wall format, you can add content like you are building a brick wall. The post will form a row from left to right. I think this layout allows for a true "bulletin board" layout. There is no actual organization, just building content on the wall.

In shelf, you can add columns and then Padlet will directly add posts under those columns. I am really excited to use shelf in my classroom, so expect another post about Padlet! In fact, I created a shelf-type Padlet for you to share the different ways you use Padlet in the classroom . So share away!

Padlet has templates as well!

Padlet in my Classroom

Padlet allows me to showcase my students' work and creations on a virtual wall for all to see. Students can give real-time feedback. I used Padlet in different ways in my classroom, but these features are my all-time favorites.

Passion Projects/Line Plots Proposals

I especially enjoyed using Padlet's comment feature when students shared their "elevator pitch" for their passion projects ideas. My students' posted their proposals either in text or video and let their peers give them feedback on their ideas. In addition, we used this in math when my students created their line plots and shared what question/data they wanted to collect. I notice that when students realized that their peers will be providing feedback and NOT just me, they wanted to show off their skills, and their responses were fantastic.

During Open House, I decided to showcase all their writing using the QR feature built into Padlet. I displayed QR codes around the room and parents loved that they could see their child's writing, videos, and creations by just scanning it with their phones.

To share a Padlet or print out a QR code:

1. Click share on the top right of Padlet

2. Click on share/export/embed

3. Choose to print code, copy link, or embed into website

4. If you are choosing to print QR code, click on print code and then print. Click for more ways to print or share Padlet.

Posting a question or collecting resources is another great use. Students can upload any type of media from an audio file to videos, links, and photos. Having students use Padlet to collect resources and share what they had found became a great crowdsourcing tool for students.

We also used Padlet as a message board for one of my students who was out ill for more than a month. I shared the link with the principal and vice principal to also share messages I attached that link to Google Classroom and my students were able to leave messages throughout the week. He loved it! In addition, he was able to comment on each message, and it gave him a way of still being connected to our class during his illness.

I know that my 4th and 5th-grade students really enjoyed using Google Classroom and all the GSuite tools to publish their writing. But every time I would tell them that they were going to post their writing to a Padlet, they LOVED it! I know that peer feedback and having that authentic audience is so powerful for all students. Having their writing displayed virtually gave students the opportunity to see growth in their writing by comparing Padlets.

Lastly, Padlet is free to all. You can purchase different subscriptions that provide for different functionality, but everything that I have mentioned is free, and you are not limited to templates or how many you can make. It is a revolutionary tool that promotes students' creativity, choice, and voice!

Let me know how you use padlet and its features in the classroom. Add your response to this Padlet!

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Different ways to use Padlet in the classroom. - TechFairies

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Padlet is a virtual bulletin board that shows responses/resources to be posted in real time. I am fond of and am a big advocate of all of the GSuite tools. However, my favorite tool is Padlet! Padlet is the hub, the home page, the museum of digital artifacts posted from many artists.

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Wakelet allows you to curate and organize web resources.

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Wakelet | The All In One Content Platform

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Wakelet allows you to bookmark, organize, collaborate and present on content all in one platform. Harness your content to build remarkable things.

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Hi, I'm Matt Miller. I love supporting teachers and saving them time. I'm all about deep, meaningful, FUN learning.

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Ditch That Textbook offers technology for teachers that allows them to revolutionize their classrooms. With these educational technology tools, teachers can embrace classroom innovation & creativity.

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Learn how to design an innovative, engaging, 21st century classroom through engaging, value-packed tutorials that teach you the most important features of the most impactful EdTech apps on the market today! With a combined 20+ years of classroom teaching experience and a combined 10+ years creatin…

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How to Teach Remotely with a Google Slides Hyperdoc

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How to create an interactive PDF in Google Slides 

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How to create an interactive PDF in Google Slides 

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Here are the steps:

1. Create a new google slide presentation and set up page to 8.5 by 11( delete all text boxes to make a blank page)

2.Find the worksheet you want to use and screenshot only the area you want your students to work on.

3. Save screenshot on desktop (easier to find)

4. Upload screenshot photo to your slide as a background (this will make it a still image)

5. Place text boxes on areas you want your students to type and type "TEXT" so boxes are visible. (Don't forget to title your presentation)

6. Upload the presentation to your google classroom and make each student a copy.

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Interactive PDF for Google Classroom-S.mp4

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