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. 

It's Official, Posterous Is Shutting Down - Get Your Data Now

A few weeks ago when it seemed inevitable that Posterous Spaces would be shutting I wrote directions on how to deal with it. Yesterday, Posterous made its official announcement that it will be shutting down on April 30. The announcement includes some directions on how to export your data. You can also follow my annotated screenshots of the process. (click the images to view them in full size)


Step 1: Sign into your Posterous Spaces account and select "backup."

Step 2: Select the blog(s) that you want to backup.

Step 3: Enter captcha code and your email address to be notified when your backup is ready.

Step 4: Download zip file containing the contents of your blog.

One of the great things about Posterous was that students could post to a group blog via email. That option is also available in Blogger. You can learn how to set that up in Blogger in my post here.