Reviews of Padlet and Nearpod

Experience with Padlet

This week I had decided to review Padlet as a resource. There is a desktop and app version of Padlet. I signed up for the free version, which gives you a limited number of Padlets that you can create and you can only upload files of smaller sizes. You can, of course, upgrade with prices starting at $8.25 a month.

To create a Padlet, you can either pick from templates or you can start from scratch. If you start from scratch, you will pick a type of Padlet to create. Below are the options:

I wanted to do discussion questions on the U.S. Constitution so I picked the Canvas format, although Backchannel would have worked as well. This is what my Padlet looked like when I was finished:

This would be the view as both the creator or someone who is just contributing. To add a comment, you click on the pink + button at the bottom right hand corner. You can the connect the comments with an arrow. One thing that I liked about this app is there are a variety of ways to answer questions or respond to something. Below are all of the options:

Honestly, I did not like this app. Although it was fairly easy to use, I thought there were a lot of negatives. If I were to use this site, I would want to use it more than once but I would run out Padlets that I could create for free. I don't think I would want to pay $8.25 a month for this. Another negative thing is that it could get confusing if you had a large class participating in a Padlet. There's no zoom out feature so you have to scroll around to see all the answers. The format is even worse from the app. You can only see part of the screen from a phone so you would really have to stick to using a laptop or computer to use Padlet. 

It could have just been the type of Padlet that I chose, but I was not a a fan of this resource. Because I didn't like what I created, I decided that I wanted to look at another resource.

Here is my Padlet:

Experience with Nearpod

I have actually seen Nearpod used in a classroom before and some of my peers have reviewed Nearpod in our Technology class so I wanted to dig in for myself. 

I first tried to create one from my phone using the app, but it told me I had to grab a computer to start a new slide. I didn't use a template or anything because I just wanted to do a few slides for a warm up on the First Amendment. 

You can add slides by clicking on the Add Slide button and add the content that you want on each slide. This is what the overview of my slides look like:

To create different types of question, I clicked on Add Slide, and then got to this screen:

From there I clicked Add Activity and then I used Open Ended Questions and Polls, which you can get to by clicking that little white arrow to see the rest of the activity options.

Besides the issue of not being able to create on the phone, I liked this app. I thought it would be helpful as a warm up or exit ticket, although I've also seen it used during a lesson as well. 

Here is my Nearpod: