Tried and tested

10. Classroom experience with mind map tool.

My Tuesday group re-visited their Padlet work this week. They had moved onto another module for a while and then the Christmas break got in the way, so it had been around six weeks since they had seen their work.

At the end of that session we printed out their creations and I handed back the hard copies. Had their initial opinion changed?
Just to re-cap, Padlet is a mind-mapping tool that works a little like a bulletin board. Users can post 'sticky notes' on an on-screen page - they can be short chunks of text, photos or videos and more than one user can work together on the same page.
We used it as a way to pull together information gleaned during web research about a number of tourism destinations. However, at the end of the Padlet session a show of hands suggested it hadn't passed our test and it turned out that the passage of time hadn't changed the verdict. When asked if we should use Padlet for the next piece of work, the vote was unanimous - no.
What I found interesting though, was why. To me Padlet's strength is its 'shareability', that it users can collaborate. But that didn't earn it friends with my students, who felt that felt it let them down for two simple reasons, that Padlet's creators might like to sort out as soon as possible.

There was the problem of hard copies. A paper version is a must for work files, but Padlet seems to lose lots of its visual impact on the way to the printer.
But the other big problem seemed a very minor one, at least to me.For the students, the disappointment focused mostly on the limited font sizes available for headings.
Personally, I quite like what Padlet has to offer and will re-visit it.  I think I need to fully understand what it has to offer - reading what the blog Teaching History has to say, I think I'm missing the point just a little.
Its review has a link to a sample Padlet that looks really quite interesting. Given the right task, I think it could be a useful tool.


Sources
Padlet www.padlet.com (accessed: 2.12.14)
Teaching History www.teachinghistory.org (accessed 13.1.15)