Retrieval practice

So how much can you remember?  That’s what retrieval is all about- give your students a prompt and then have them write what they know.  There are many ways to do this and Alice Keeler shares her version using Padlet. While this is a paid service, you can make 3 Padlets for free. Please see her blog post here.

What you could do with a Padlet

 Dena Mazur (SUES 4th grade) mentioned she was using Padlet and kindly offered to share her ideas:

Every Wednesday, students practice their opinion writing and citing evidence using a "Would you rather" prompt. The students use Padlet to share their thoughts. They especially love adding drawings and images. 

Students are held accountable for their independent reading using Padlet. Each week, I post question choices for the students to respond to by citing evidence. This is a truer measure of "actual reading" than a log. 

While I loved Padlet (when it was free), you might find the 3 sites free version confining.  You might consider Wakelet- while it doesn’t have the exact layout of Padlet, it does have many of the same features. (As an aside, Wakelet does integrate with FlipGrid which is not approved in the district).

Padlet 2.0

Sometimes even good things get better- and that is the case with Padlet.  Don’t know Padlet?  

Think online post-it notes where you can add text, images, and links.  This week, during a training session,I had teachers post examples of sites for a project.  It is free, easy to use- and what I find great about working with students is the comment moderation feature.

Recently Richard Byrne (Free Technology for Teachers) shared their most recent update.Please click here to read his post.

Using Padlet for Summer Reading notes

I listened to a webinar today about summer reading.  One of the suggestions was to use Padlet as a live summer log.  Here the students could post their thoughts about what they were reading and the teacher periodically would comment.  I’ve made one here you can try (here’s the link).  One of the nice things about Padlet is the ability for comment moderation (so nothing goes public until you approve it! (That's the feature I've used here.)

In addition to the summer, this might be a fun way to provide a voice to kids during the school year.  While I allowed a name for each post, you can make it anonymous.

Go ahead and share- what are you reading?

Something new in Padlet

I haven’t played with Padlet in a while yet when I saw the post from Richard Byrne (Free Technology for Teachers) about their new flowchart feature, I was interested.  There is now an easy way to create a flow chart on Padlet (see Richard’s video here).  I really like the collaborative nature of the product- maybe something to try in your class after testing?