Padlet

In this series, teachers of Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) share their experiences, insights and opinions on different educational tools they used during their online courses. To inspire you as a fellow lecturer, and save you the time so you don't need to figure out things for yourself.

Padlet is next in this series of favourite tools to enrich education with. Mélodine Sommier, assistant professor in Intercultural Communication at the department of Media and Communication (ESHCC), thinks Padlet's versatility is one of its greatest strengths. You can use it as a discussion or pinning board, it can take the shape of a map or a timeline, and you can also adjust all types of settings about style or anonymity. Its versatility means you can use Padlet throughout your course instead of jumping from one platform to another. It is also a very intuitive tool, easy to use for teachers and students.

It is a visualisation tool and a participatory platform. Mélodine really likes that students are able to produce knowledge together in the same place. They are able to see and comment on each other’s posts, which creates a nice group dynamic. As a teacher, you have a different outcome every time you use Padlet because of your students’ input, which allows you to tailor your teaching to their needs. Visualisation is central to Padlet, whether it is because photographs are posted or because of the way posts are organised. Visualising ideas and their connections support students’ learning process in terms of analytical skills and visual literacy.

Mélodine often used Padlet as a pinning board where students can, for instance, introduce themselves, see the first image for an examples. In the honours course “Communicating sustainability in an intercultural context”, Mélodine and her colleagues Yijing Wang (ESHCC) and Ana Vasques, (EUC) used the map option of Padlet (see the second image). Students were asked to locate on the map examples of sustainable urgencies and innovations they knew of. Afterwards, this allowed them to discuss the global dimension of sustainability as well as the limitations of their knowledge, in part because of a Western-centric bias. The absence of any pins in Africa, Central Asia or Russia becomes all the more obvious with that tool.

Please note that this experience is based on Padlet's free version.