Padlet, Schmadlet

A childish title for this blog post I know, but there you go. I was inspired to try Padlet after one of my fellow students on the course introduced it to the group during one of the teaching sessions. I had a quick play with it, as I had been looking for something that might help encourage MAPP students to begin jotting down and sharing ideas about dissertation topics for next year. As padlet allows postings as though on a 'wall', I thought this might work as an electronic version of 'post-it' notes, something we had used in previous years. The advantage is the discussion could build and develop over time, students could comment on others' ideas, and so on. So I thought I would give it a shot and set up a page with some brief instructions:

The students needed a bit of coaxing, but eventually they started to add some of their thoughts:

So, so far so good. It does seem a little limited in that the option to print out as a text file doesn't keep comments together (in that a comment relating to an original post is not listed alongside this). Perhaps an online mind-mapping tool is what is needed instead? The live padlet page can be found here.