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Collaborative Study Tools: Lessons Learned from Padlet

My American Literature teacher introduced our class to an online application, Padet, my sophomore year of college. It looked relatively simple when I opened the website, but I neglected to look into it until my junior year. One of my courses, Critical Theory, was hugely challenging for me and I needed help getting through the material.

It appeared to be a blank page I could add sticky note-like text boxes to, and I explored it a bit more. What I found was that I could share the page I was working on with others. I set up a title and everything, then shared it with the rest of my classmates in my Critical Theory course.

The automated emails Padlet sent out often got sorted into junk folders, so I individually spoke to each person and guided them through accessing the Padlet page. It was tedious, but soon everyone was on it. I could access the share settings and give all users permission to edit and transform this study guide.

This is what it ended up looking like:

It was a collaborative way for all of us to make sense of one of the toughest subjects our English department at Plymouth State had to offer. I added the text boxes beforehand for people to add descriptions to, and after a few reminders during class, we had done it!

During this process, we discovered additional tools within Padlet:

After double-clicking on a post, the user can highlight a part of the text to find buttons for: bold, italic, strikeout, highlight, superscript, subscript, hyperlink, quotation marks, brackets, a math formatting option (pie symbol), bullet points, and numbered bullet points.

There was also the option to upload documents to the study guide for others to download, and I uploaded my annotations from class (pictured to the left of the photo above). The tools for attachments within a post can be found at the bottom of each post when double-clicked on to edit:

You can add photos, video links, documents, and audio files to posts. This made it easy to add the syllabus for the class and other notes. It was all very exciting, but not everyone in the class contributed to it. Out of 16 students the Padlet was shared with, 9 students contributed to its contents. What did this tell me?

1. Not everyone studies in the same way

2. Not everyone wants to share their notes (which is okay)

3. Not everyone got the email to join Padlet or knew it existed

As great as the Padlet features were for collaborative learning, there were a lot of steps to get set up on Padlet as a user. You have to open the email link, set up an account name, and contribute. Even though this process looks similar to Google Docs, the app isn't as familiar to most as Google is.

How could I be disappointed in anyone for not contributing when I had never shown everyone how to use the app? I always forget that people like to use things that are familiar to them, and learning new tools in the middle of a challenging college course isn't exactly ideal.

More than this, not everyone has the time to upload content onto an online study guide on top of homework, studying, and other commitments. Despite all this, more than half of our class contributed, and I couldn't complain. I made a second study guide for our final exam for the same class, and it was even less successful contributor-wise.

The following semester, I made a Padlet for my British Literature class. This time, I added 22 students to it. 15 classmates managed to make a Padlet account and access the Padlet. I worked harder on this one, and uploaded my own handwritten class notes to it. Sadly, there were no contributors besides myself this time. So, I quit working on it.

I ceased using Padlet until the next semester when I took a Global Literature course. Finally, I had learned how to use Padlet to its full capacity. The page looked like this:

I had each text we covered in a column of its own, and I had figured out how to set each post to allow comments from classmates. I uploaded many of my own typed class notes, and found additional resources all over the internet. I asked people in the class if they wanted to be part of it, and some who remembered our Critical Theory course said yes. Others who weren't sure about it never saw it.

Throughout the semester, I checked the Padlet to see if someone had commented or added anything to it. It was exciting to see people add to a study guide, and I wanted to see their perspectives. Instead, I found that I was the only one posting, and I stopped reminding others that it was there. I mean, we were all in college. If people wanted to be part of it, they would be.

If I couldn't make a study guide for others, I would at least make one for myself. I worked hard on it all semester, and still no one asked me about it. When we received instructions for our final exam, people were worried about reviewing the content. At first, I thought about being the class savior and sharing my notes. It was tempting, especially since I love to help people. I imagined standing in front of the class and having the moment be something like this:

Once I had thought about it for a few days, I made the decision to kick the only three students who had accessed the Padlet study guide (but not contributed) off of it completely. I had a conversation with one student when I was asked about access to the Padlet one week before the exam date. I told this classmate that the study guide was supposed to be about collaboration, and that I didn't feel comfortable sharing my notes with everyone when the Padlet was not used.

My takeaways from this experience are that maybe I was too idealistic and ambitious with the way I was using Padlet. Getting a group of twenty or so students to contribute to something they're not even being graded on is a lot to ask. I stopped trying to figure out reasons why other students did not seem as enthusiastic about it as I was because in the end, all of us study somewhat differently.

As far as I've seen, most of the collaborative thinking happens in the class itself. People share ideas during discussion, the teacher asks for other perspectives and interpretations, and we (hopefully) soak it all in. One of my classmates told me that my definitions were too long to remember. I looked back at my study guide and saw that there were tons of post-it note boxes to scroll through, I couldn't even count them all.

My conclusion with this whole Padlet study guide business is that it should be used in smaller doses, and with very specific learning goals in mind. It becomes too overwhelming when there is no established end product, and when the possibilities for studying are endless. I looked up everything I could about each text, and bombarded the study guide with links that looked impressive--and for what?

Padlet is a strong tool, but doesn't seem like an effective tool to use for long-term projects. When I take notes, it helps me to write down most of what was said during that class, because I'm a kinesthetic learner. If someone looked at the notes I wrote on the Padlet, they might have to rewrite them just to be able to study.

The way my brain works just isn't the same as the way someone else's brain works, and for some, my Padlets might have been counterproductive. Whether or not you are familiar with Gardner's learning styles, we all approach solving problems and tasks in different ways. Group work is beneficial, but trying to get everyone to learn the same way is not. It's okay to study individually, and to even have study groups.

When I browsed through other Padlet pages on the Padlet website, I saw creations that reached beyond study guides: surveys, photo contest postings, goal and habit trackers, resource lists, portfolios, discussion boards, recipe books, reading bookshelves, and even exit tickets for classrooms. For someone who claims to be creative, I had taken a massively traditional route with the creation of my Padlets.

None of this means that I think my efforts with Padlet were failures. I am not under the impression that Padlet is an impossible tool to make a study guide with, I had one class where many students contributed, and another where no one joined me. There were a number of factors in both scenarios: different teaching styles, course content, and personal familiarity with students. I was also trying to be more of a student leader than a regular student trying to study.

Why limit myself and others? The next time I use this innovative online app, I will branch away from study guides. As a teacher, I need to be more deliberate with the way I use classroom tools. Lost class time is irreplaceable, so do I want to spend a whole lot of time on a study guide? How can I figure out the way my students learn best? My opinion is that many more students learn from particular experiences and practice, not simply copying information over on digital post-it notes.

My final thought on any incorporation of Padlet is that I will be using it as a supplemental tool when I have my own classroom. It is important for students to have digital literacy, but this does not need to be the sole focus for students to deepen their learning experiences and takeaways. Learning is not necessarily a perfect and neat process that can be synthesized to create one product, but there are tools out there to help every student. Does each tool need to be used the same way? Not necessarily.

Does this all mean that I will stop using Padlet? Absolutely not.


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