Updated - A Teacher's Guide to Classroom Backchannels & Informal Assessment

Back in January I published a guide to using backchannels in the classroom. Shortly after I published that guide Wallwisher changed its name to Padlet. This weekend I updated the guide to include the Padlet name as well as some updated directions. The guide includes ideas and directions for using Padlet, Socrative, and TodaysMeet. You can download the guide here and view it as embedded below.

Now You Can Export Padlet (Wallwisher) Walls as PDFs and Images

For the last couple of months Padlet (formerly known as Wallwisher) has been steadily adding new features. First, the moderation options were improved. Then the name was changed. Two weeks ago a new group blog option was added. And now Padlet offers an option to download the contents of your walls as PDFs, images, Excel, or CSV files. Once downloaded you can print the contents of your walls. I also just noticed that Padlet has a Chrome app too.


Applications for Education
If you ever need to create a physical record of activity on your Padlet walls to discuss comments with your students, the new export options will be just what you need. 

Padlet Streams - A Simple Way to Create a Group Blog

Padlet (formerly known as Wallwisher) is one of my favorite tools to use to have students quickly share ideas, questions, and multimedia notes on one page. Until today all of the notes that were added to a Padlet page appeared wherever a visitor double clicked. You can still use that free form format, but now you can also use a chronological format that Padlet is calling "streams."  Streams places all notes into a chronological order based on the timestamp of when each note is written.

Applications for Education
Creating a Padlet page in the stream format could be a good way to create a simple, collaborative blog for students. You could create the page, select "stream" format, and make the page accessible for students to write short posts on. Their posts could include images and videos. If you want to, you can password protect your Padlet pages and moderate messages before they appear on your Padlet page. Please see A Teacher's Guide to Backchannels and Informal Assessment Tools to learn more about using Padlet.