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There are so many uses of Padlet within the classroom setting, it is hard to begin. I started this "Tickets Out the Door Series" of blog posts when I was trying to figure out a few options to use in my own classroom. I started by looking at the least complicated program, Answer Garden. I moved to Lino, which is a nice "sticky note" style collaboration tool with a lot of powerful features. This post is about Padlet, a very powerful app that continues with the collaboration aspect of Lino, but also builds in an easy way to have students design and layout windows that are customized to the user. In other words, this can be a student creative tool for their own group work. Here are some great links to tutorials:
**The image below is from the Padlet main landing page. 
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 Lino is an online collaboration platform that lets teachers and students collaborate using virtual sticky notes, pictures, and text on a virtual canvas. As a teacher, you can have multiple classes set up. For me, this means I can have my five 3rd grade classes (one each day) have one canvas to collaborate on a project each day of the week. Same for the rest of the grades. Lino is much prettier than Answer Garden, but that also makes it more complicated for some audiences. It can get quite colorful and very busy to look at. There are also a lot of teacher controls, and a lot of user controls. I literally open Lino up, teach orientation for 2-3 minutes, and let the kids start using it while I'm talking. As the kids start playing with it, they discover new tools, and they learn from each other how to use the multitude of controls. You'd have a much harder time using the output of this platform into a word art maker (like Tagul). Lino also has a iPhone and Android app download that is quite nice for adults or BYOD events like conferences. Other uses that I have used with students include students making their own bulletin board of pictures, notes, and reminders. I have used this program for many years and it keeps getting more intuitive and this allows me to use it with younger and younger students. At one point, they even simplified their name. It used to be LINOIT, and people were confused on how the "OIT" should be pronounced. **Both pictures are screen shots of the landing page of Lino.   Answer Garden lacks the "pretty" of other post assessment options, but if you have a class like I do...750 kids per week, you can generate some pretty interesting feedback from your students. Basically with this tool, a presenter or teacher can generate a "quick & clean" word-list ready to export into a "pretty" word art generator (think Tagul or similar). Or, as I often prefer, I just export what Answer Garden generates. It is word-art in and of itself.
Classroom Screen, found at https://classroomscreen.com/ has to be the neatest "simple" tool I have found recently. It is a classroom projection board that has some nice classroom tools. It is also nice because the background comes up with a new photo each time you reload the page. See the screen shots below. You can customize the background with your own pictures too. The toolbar is clean and labeled nicely.  I loaded up all the tools that display, except the noise meter. The noise meter requires an extension and I haven't installed it yet on my teacher computer in the classroom. The clock expands to include the calendar. The timer comes in hourglass countdown, and stopwatch style timer. The lower left of this screen is a random student selector. I typed in Students 1 - 5 - since I've got 750 students and they are all assigned a computer station. There is a QR code generator, should I need the group with iPads to qo to a particular site, and I don't want to spend 45 minutes simply entering and reentering the URL. There is a traffic signal where you can click red/yellow/green. There is a symbol+word set of behavioral expectations you can select. This one is set on "whisper voice." There are two drawing features. One is a window within a window. The other is the whole board goes to a white board.  Finally, there is an Exit Poll. This feature is how I came to love this app in the first place. When lining up, the kids would click on the device, or tell me which one to click and I'd click it. Then it shows the poll of who liked this class and to what degree in a nice little bar graph. You can edit the question as well. If you needed to, you could keep a class level set of exit tickets over time by snapping a screen shot of the feedback graph. I came across this Random Name Spinner that is both savable and editable. I think it would work wonderfully in a classroom setting. I have 750 students, rotate through my room each week, so I call students by assigned seat number. I left some of the fun names on there and they will be "me" to give the kids a little laugh when the teacher gets called on.
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I published another STEM lesson for lower elementary school on Thingiverse. This is a gravity fed coin sorter. I did this lesson a few years ago in the second grade, and the kids used poster board, rulers, and horribly dull school scissors. They improvised layering tape over the poorly cut holes, and a few of the kids got them to work. We taped them onto the wall and tried them out. This is the 3D printed version of the iterative process.
I have access to a very small 3D printer, so I had to print the two designs in two pieces each, one top and one bottom. The design with the holes worked well considering I did not have the bottom printed for the video. The design with the pegs did not. My measurements were off just a bit, so the coins didn't pop off like they were supposed to do.
I used the U.S. Mint's reference sheet for sizes of the coins.
Here is the link with the STL files, and lesson plan with YouTube videos of example gravity fed coin sorters. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3023073
| coin_sorter_gravity_fed_lesson_plans.pdf |
At 4 am I woke up and decided to see if I could create some slightly animated posters. I'd downloaded Adobe Spark APP awhile ago, and just hadn't had the time to play with it. THis is my work after about an hour. The beach Welcome Back one was the first try to orient myself to the program. The Tech Questions of the Week were an attempt at using the color features. An the TV Production was the last one before I went to sleep, again.
Sometimes I get insomnia. I'll either get a burst of energy right before bedtime, or I'll get to sleep OK and wake up in the middle of the night and feel 100% rested. Last night I had both. I went to bed late, and passed the time looking at Pinterest for ideas for my classroom. I saw hundreds of door ideas, bulletin board ideas, and a few random things I am always compelled to click. I figure if I must be up, I might as well be productive.
Sometimes I get insomnia. I'll either get a burst of energy right before bedtime, or I'll get to sleep OK and wake up in the middle of the night and feel 100% rested. Last night I had both. I went to bed late, and passed the time looking at Pinterest for ideas for my classroom. I saw hundreds of door ideas, bulletin board ideas, and a few random things I am always compelled to click. I figure if I must be up, I might as well be productive.
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I like cooperative learning games. I have used something like this made out of laminated paper in the past, so I wanted to see how hard it was to design a prototype for the 3D printer. This is only a 3 inch prototype model because I had to scale it down to fit on my school's 3D printer. That's OK, because prototypes of the second or third try are not generally printed full-scale. As it is shown here, the plus and equals spots are too small to fit a pen or wood pencil, and the squares are too small for the unit squares aka ones blocks in the base ten block manipulatives that are everywhere in most elementary schools. So for demo purposes, we used beads.
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2960454
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2960454
Thingiverse is where my educational designs live. I began publishing this summer as part of the MakerBot Certifications Level 1 User and Level 2 Curriculum Creator. There exists a lot of manipulatives to make for the lower grades, but there are not many lessons that the kids themselves can create, and there are even fewer organized STEM lessons for this age group.
To search all of the designs at Thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/
To view my files go here: https://www.thingiverse.com/Heather_M_Miller/designs
To search all of the designs at Thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/
To view my files go here: https://www.thingiverse.com/Heather_M_Miller/designs
These are the first two education approved designs and curriculum. The little blue graduation cap means they are designs that have been approved by the educational team at Thingiverse.
I saw the Turing Tumble a while back on Kickstarter. I went ahead and ordered a personal copy of the "game" for me with the intention of evaluating it for possible use in my elementary computer lab, probably as a station. Of course, as many Kickstarter projects, it seemed to take forever. But, the makers kept in contact via email, and it finally arrived. The unboxing was pleasant, and easy, which means the packages were easy to open and intuitive. After playing around with this for about two hours, my son (4 years old) and I got through puzzle 10. He has no idea (well maybe a little idea) what is going on with the switches, and is learning to attach the green switches properly. It is marketed for kids MUCH older than he is, so it is interesting watching him figure it out. He is delighted hearing the marbles drop and the switches switch.
As for my classes, I'm thinking this is going to be a great station in the 4th and 5th grade classes. I would never do this as a station with the PreK-2nd graders because there are a ton of pieces, they are fragile, and there is simply too much reading. The reading of the book is critical to actually understanding at a basic level what is going on. Otherwise, it's an expensive, fragile Marble Run. To get the logic and computer lessons out of this, the kids will have to read and experiment.
Note. I received no product or compensation for this evaluation. I supported the Kickstarter program and received this product through that support.
As for my classes, I'm thinking this is going to be a great station in the 4th and 5th grade classes. I would never do this as a station with the PreK-2nd graders because there are a ton of pieces, they are fragile, and there is simply too much reading. The reading of the book is critical to actually understanding at a basic level what is going on. Otherwise, it's an expensive, fragile Marble Run. To get the logic and computer lessons out of this, the kids will have to read and experiment.
Note. I received no product or compensation for this evaluation. I supported the Kickstarter program and received this product through that support.
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This is a space where I post my thoughts on things and ideas in the Computer Lab. I am a K-12 certified Computer Science, Business Education, and Engineering and Technology teacher with ESOL and Gifted Endorsements.
I'm writing this for myself
and my colleagues as part of my own teaching practice day-to-day, and for my own self reflection.
I'm NOT doing this blog for compensation or free products. If I ever change that personal policy, I'll make that apparent.
Any opinions stated herein are mine and not my school district employer's.
Enjoy!
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