April 2018

April 4- 😫Pay for Padlet??😥

For our Padlet lovers out there, you may or may not know that it just became a paid service instead of free and unlimited (there is still a free version, but it caps your number of Padlets to 4 and paid plans start at $8.25/month). If you want to pay for Padlet, great! (Padlet has listened to the Twitter world and has said that they will be working to come up with a plan between free and paid with referrals to get more Padlets).

If you want a different FREE option, I have some suggestions for you. The main goal of Padlet was to create an interactive bulletin board where users (teachers, students or both) could collaborate and compile resources. Although there is no direct match for this, there are a few options out there that can offer collaboration and collaboration of resources.

Wakelet-Similar to Padlet, you can set up a wall to share content from articles, videos, images, to tweets. These "Wakes" as the boards are called, are collaborative and a great place to store many different sources all with one link.

Lino It- With Lino, you can create sticky notes and organize them by category. On the sticky notes, you can store information, links, pictures and other content. These boards are also able to be shared through a single link.

Scrumblr- Scrumblr lets you put notecards on a whiteboard to organize your thinking. You can retitle the headings and text on the cards. This simple site doesn't require a login and it produces a single link for your board that you can share with others.

Google is an amazing collaboration resource with a tool for everything! Since it is so share-friendly, all of their tools would make a good substitution for group projects/collaboration work, but here are two of the lesser known options that would make a great Padlet substitution.

Google Drawings- Using images, shapes, text and other tools, Drawings lets you create posters, hyperdocs and other collaboration spaces. The sky is the limit. Matt Miller shares some great templates for Google Drawings in this post.

Google Slides- Ryan O'Donnell has created some great templates for Google Slides that look like Padlet backgrounds. You can use these backgrounds and add in your own links, images, videos and other media to make it a joint workspace to share and present about.

Interested in trying out one of these new resources? Click on the chart on the right to take you to Steve Wick's blog and get all his resources that go with the tool. There is also a detailed description on how these tools meet the 4C's (Collaboration, Creativity, Communication, Contribute)

Collaboration Resources from Steve Wick and

Recharge Learning: Student Skills Connected to Collaboration

April 11- GoGuardian Chromebook Monitoring

Although it is nearing the end of the year, it is a good time for a GoGuardian reminder. If you having heard of this program, it is a web-based Chromebook monitoring program that ASD purchased to help you get a visual on what your students are doing on their computers. With the basic monitoring, you are also able to take a snapshot of their screen, close their tabs and chat with them without leaving your desk (although walking around the room to gain proximity is always a great idea as well 😉). At this point in the year, more monitoring is often a good thing. 😜 If you haven't used it yet this year, setup is a breeze! Here are some terms you may need to know.

Classroom- this is the term for the groupings of students you put in either through Google Classroom, importing a spreadsheet or having students enroll using the class code (easiest way).

Session- when you start a session, you begin monitoring students in your class on the Chromebooks they are using. You can set up a schedule in advance to automatically run sessions at certain times or you can "start session" whenever you get out the Chromebooks.

Scene: Not only is this program good for monitoring what students do on their computers, it also has tools to help you lock students into the tabs/websites you choose and in doing so, blocking all other sites, called a scene.

Scenes can be helpful during a testing period, research projects or as a general safety measure for every class.

You can apply a scene to a classroom (for every time you run a session with that class) or just during a session (such as with testing or a research project).

This is a great tool! Please let me know if you need help getting started.