What is Padlet?
Padlet is an online platform that describes itself as “somewhere between a doc and a full-fledged website builder.” Users can collaborate on real-time, shared boards by adding and editing posts. They can also add rich multimedia, such as images, links, and documents. Posts can be arranged in various formats to best suit the content, including whiteboards, grids, timelines, and maps. Padlet offers a range of interactive features such as anonymous contributions, comments, and reactions.
How do you access Padlet?
To create your own Padlet board, sign up for a free Padlet account. New users can have up to three Padlet boards – after that, you’ll need to delete an existing board before being able to create a new one.
Premium monthly subscriptions offer an unlimited number of Padlet boards, starting at C$8 per month for individuals and C$12 per month for teachers with unlimited student accounts.
Students do not need to create an account to contribute to an instructor’s Padlet board. Contributing to Padlets belonging to others will not add to your own quota of three boards.
How can instructors and/or students use Padlet?
Padlet can be used as a platform for collaborative and interactive activities that allow students to see each other’s contributions. It can be used for group projects, to facilitate anonymous participation, and as an open question board. Students can use Padlet to create concept maps, timelines, and blogs. It can also be used as a presentation tool, as demonstrated during a webinar by Professor James Skidmore.
For more examples, visit Padlet’s Gallery.
Benefits
- Beth Fuchs at the University of Kentucky (2014) found these benefits when using Padlet to facilitate participation activities:
- Anonymous contributions allow for inclusive participation and empower students to share their ideas.
- Instructors can gain a holistic view of students’ understanding by hearing from more students compared with hand-raising in class.
- Responses remain on the Padlet board for future reference and are shared in real-time with the whole class.
- Additionally, Padlets can be embedded into LEARN for easy access.
Evidence of Efficacy
- In a study with 40 first-year undergraduate students, Padlet was used to facilitate an online debate. Interviews with the students, and analysis of their work, showed that they shared, applied, and internalized knowledge. Students felt that Padlet was suitable for learning and were curious to learn from their peers’ shared content and comments. The study also demonstrated how Padlet can reduce the student-student and TA-student communication gap (Dewitt et al., 2015).
- In another study at a public university in Malaysia, Padlet was used to facilitate tasks throughout a semester for 87 students. 90% of students said that Padlet motivated them to complete tasks and 97.5% agreed that it encouraged them to interact with their peers. Because posts were visible to the whole class, 97.5% of students reviewed and edited their writing before posting, which was helpful for language learning (Rashid et al., 2019).
Best Practices
- As with any educational technology, explain to students your rationale for using Padlet in your course and how it relates to your learning outcomes (Fuchs, 2015).
- Consider enabling anonymous posting so that students feel empowered to contribute (Fuchs, 2015). Share the Padlet using a link rather than inviting Padlet users and/or turn off author attribution for each post.
- Be aware of privacy settings on your Padlet and whether you want to password-protect the information shared. Set visitor permissions appropriately depending on how you want others to interact with your board.
- You can export Padlet boards as an image, PDF, or spreadsheet. You can also clone someone else’s Padlet to use the same format and/or keep a record of the posts.
- For an additional level of interaction, you can enable comments and reactions on posts.
Support
If you would like support applying these tips to your own teaching, CTE staff members are here to help. View the CTE Support page to find the most relevant staff member to contact.
References
- DeWitt, D., Alias, N., & Siraj, S. (2015). Collaborative learning: Interactive debates using Padlet in a higher education institution. In: International Educational Technology Conference (IETC 2015), 27-29 May 2015, Istanbul, Turkey. (Submitted)
- Fuchs, B. (2014). The writing is on the wall: using Padlet for whole-class engagement. LOEX Quarterly, 40(4), 7.
- Rashid, A. A., Yunus, M. M., & Wahi, W. (2019). Using Padlet for collaborative writing among ESL learners. Creative Education, 10(3), 610-620.
Additional Resources
- Getting outside the LMS: Leveraging Padlet for your classroom needs
- Padlet Support
- Padlet Hacks
- Padlet 101 for Higher Education by Dr. Jodie Taylor at the SAE Qantm Creative Media Institute
This Creative Commons license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon our work non-commercially, as long as they credit us and indicate if changes were made. Use this citation format: Padlet. Centre for Teaching Excellence, University of Waterloo.