Review of Padlet

Today, I will be looking at Padlet (like embedded in name), another online collaborative tool.

What is Padlet?

The concept behind Padlet is very simple. It mimics a real-life board where one can put up sticky notes, except that it is all online. This online element provides an added dimension and modality to a simple idea, and also allows for collaboration and communication to happen.

The customisability of the Padlet board to make it as colourful as one wants it to be does also makes it more visually enticing. 

The other great thing about Padlet is that one can modify the url of a particular board to make it unique and easy to remember and share with others. Privacy settings allows for the creator to make the board as open or as close as possible.

In addition to text, anyone who has access to the padlet board can insert pictures, urls and videos into their "sticky notes". This multimodality allows for greater flexibility and creativity, which makes it more interesting and fun for students.

The comment function allows for collaboration and communication as people can come together to discuss ideas that have been posted.

As you can see in the picture, under the "Modify" settings (which appears as a tiny cog on the top right hand corner of the Padlet board), the creator of the Padlet board is able to adjust settings on "posting" and "collaboration". 

The different ways for readers to show their reactions to posts, by liking, voting, giving a star or grading it, presents many opportunities and ways for the authors to get feedback.

For teachers, "attribution" (to track the authorship of posts) and "profanity filter" (to ensure that the language is kept clean) will be especially helpful.  

Should one not have a computer, Padlet is also available on Apple Store as an app, and the website can be easily accessed using a smartphone or tablet. 

Uses

As with any collaboration tool, it is best served as an online discussion or brainstorming platform about a particular theme or topic since many different ideas can be showcased and students are able to leave comments and feedback about what they see. Moreover, since there seems to be no expiry date, as long as they have the url, students can refer back to the Padlet board at a later time and date to revisit the ideas that were exchanged.

Another use could be for students to showcase their work that had been done on another online platform so their classmates are able to view them. I had actually done this before -- I had my students (who were starting their first year at the secondary school) do up an online poster on Glogster introducing themselves, and they had to submit the url to their Glogster on a Padlet created for this purpose. This was meant to encourage them to look at one another's work so as to help them get to know one another better.

In the language classroom, Padlet can encourage students to share their opinions, especially students who are afraid to speak up in the classroom. Therefore, they will have the opportunity to practise using the language. As with the numerous research done on how writing blogs aid in improving language, because students see that their classmates will be able to view what they have written, they would be more mindful about their spelling and the grammatical structure of sentences. 

Teachers can even have students create their own Padlet board about a particular theme or topic and this can be shared with others. This allows for content knowledge to flow easily between students, and places the onus of learning on the students. As Ghasemi & Hashemi (2011) said, in this day and age, the role of the teacher should no longer be seen as a repository of knowledge, but as a facilitator and guide to help students" to be skilled in selecting, accessing, evaluating, organizing and storing" the vast amount of information available.

Advantages & Disadvantages

The online element allows for students to learn about multimodality as they have to think about the suitability of the visuals that they are going to put up on the board in relation to the theme or topic that has been assigned.

Moreover, students are not able to modify what other people posted. This protects their work and prevents them from copying one another, or even worse, deleting and erasing the effort that others had put in.

However, the open nature of Padlet means that, while it prevents outright plagiarism, students are still able to view what others have posted and rephrase those words to pass them off as their own ideas. This would hinder original thought and might also end up creating a sort of "herd" mentality, where students all present ideas that support only one particular stand, especially if it is on a controversial topic and students do not want to stand out or to be seen to be different since all posts and comments are tagged to a particular username. As such, teachers will need to create an environment where students feel safe to voice out differing opinions and not be judged based on that.

In Singapore's context

There is so much potential for Padlet to be used in Singapore schools. Since it is available as an app, and the website can be easily accessed with a smartphone or tablet, should there be limited time (which is usually the case), teachers can continue class discussions online, or have students post their thoughts on a particular topic online after the lesson or at home. It would be a great alternative to traditional paper and pen in gathering ideas, and is also in line with Singapore's ICT Masterplan 4, where student learning takes place anytime, anywhere.

Conclusion

Padlet is a simple tool which does not require much technical expertise on the part of the teachers or students. It is easy to create, and allows for much collaboration and practise in terms of language use.

References

Ghasemi, B. & Hashemi, M. (2011). ICT: Newwave in English language learning/teaching. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 15, 3098–3102.

Review of Wordsift

Today's post will be about Wordsift, which is a useful tool to help learners with increasing their vocabulary bank.

What is Wordsift?

Wordsift is a web-based site that allows word clouds to be created from any text. This helps students and teachers to identify the most commonly used words in the text. The bigger the font in the word cloud, the more common the word in the text. Below is an example of the word cloud from Martin Luther King Jr's famous "I Have a Dream" speech. As can be seen by the size of the word, "freedom" appears most frequently in the text. 

Hovering over each word tells you how many times it appears in the text.

Clicking on it will enable you to see the word used in context within the text.

The other interesting feature is that it has WordNet embedded in the site. This allows for exposure to related words and phrases.

Hovering over each node in the diagram will give the definition of the word which shows how it is related to the other word(s) that branch out from the main word. The example provided is also useful for learners.

The other useful thing about Wordsift is that it calculates the readability level of the text, among other things, if you click on the "Text View" button at the top of the page.

From the screenshot, you can see that it provides quite a bit of statistical information about the text - like word count and lexical density - on top of the Readability Index and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level.

A note of caution about interpreting the different readability indexes - the numbers may not correspond to the actual readability of the text and is only a guide. A text that has a low Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level only means that it contains shorter sentences and words that have fewer syllables. It does not measure the pragmatics of the text. Hence, a text with a low Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score can still be dealing with a topic that is not easily understood by students even though the words and sentences are short, thus making it difficult for students to comprehend.

Uses

Wordsift is especially useful for teachers when helping students comprehend a text on a particular topic or revolving around a certain theme. It does not work quite as well as with narrative text types, since words are unlikely to be repeated.

The visual representation of the text in the form of a word cloud helps students to see the gist of the text immediately, since the higher frequency words appear larger than other words, indicating what the text is about. This could then be used to activate students' schemata, which will help them with processing the text.

Words in the word cloud can also be sorted in alphabetical order or frequency, which can help teachers narrow the focus of what to look at.

The WordNet part will allow teachers to introduce new words and phrases that are related to certain words in the text. This could be the lead-in to another activity that is related to the topic.

Wordsift can even be used as a tool to encourage learner autonomy since students can input their own text and ascertain what words are most frequent. They can also look at the WordNet section, and discover new word associations or revise what they already know.

Advantages

The site is user-friendly and is a quick and simple way of helping learners figure out the main idea of the text in a way that is visually appealing as there is colour. The WordNet part also helps teachers extend students' learning beyond what is found in the text.

Disadvantages

The WordNet part is still a work in progress and hence, there may be some inaccuracies or might not contain as much information. However, the concept behind it is still innovative and useful for learners.

One major drawback is that if the teacher or student does not have the text in soft copy, it will have to be converted before it can be put into WordSift and that takes time.

In Singapore's Context

As the site is easily accessible, Singapore teachers will find it useful and be able to integrate it easily into the lesson. Wordsift is definitely useful in helping students break down the text and understand it better. The WordNet section is also a powerful tool to help students create word associations and expand their vocabulary.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, WordSift is valuable as a resource for teachers and students to see a text being represented in a different manner, enabling students to see it from a different perspective and gain greater understanding of what they are reading.

Review of Educreations

Today, I will be looking at the mobile app, Educreations (link to webpage embedded in name).

What is Educreations?

Educreations is available as an iPad app and can be accessed via the Internet. It is meant for teachers or students to create content of multimodal means via an iPad. You can draw and write as you record yourself speaking, and a video is captured of everything that is happening on the screen. As such, when used on an iPad, you would need a stylus pen to aid you. If you are accessing it via the web, you will need to hook up a drawing tablet or an interactive whiteboard. Hence, for all intents and purposes, I feel that it is best used as an iPad app since one does not need as much equipment.

There is a free and a paid version. As a free version, it only has the most basic of features, like only allowing 50MB of video space (which is not a lot considering that even short videos can take up a lot of space depending on the quality) and uploading of images and background to be used in the video. The paid version provides more options, like 5GB of video space and uploading of documents and presentations. It also gives you the option of exporting the video so it can be saved and stored separately.

Hence, I would say the free version provides a taster, and is meant to entice educators or schools to pay for the app. That is not necessarily a bad thing, since the paid version can help to create flipped classroom content fairly easily. Essentially, using Educreations on an iPad is like using a whiteboard with a recording function as you can draw or write anything on it, and you are only limited by the iPad screen dimensions or by whatever material that you are using as a backdrop to record and teach with.

While it seems like Educreations is similar to VoiceThread (link embedded in name), VoiceThread is web-based and has a more collaborative element to it as others who have access to the videos can comment, which allows for students to discuss what they watched. Educreations is more of a one-way street, in the sense that teachers push information to the students, albeit outside the classroom.

Advantages and Disadvantages

As mentioned, Educreations is very ideal for creating lessons for flipped classrooms, which means students are able to learn at their own pace since they can view the video as often as they want or even pause it to crucial points. Teachers can upload pre-lesson videos so students can learn concepts at home before the lesson and more time can be devoted to higher order thinking skills during class time. Post-lesson videos can also be created to reinforce learning. Moreover, since these videos can be reused over the years (barring any changes in syllabus), it can be time-saver for teachers in the long run.

Having said that, flipped classrooms hinge on the idea of students being self-directed learners who will put in the time and effort outside of classroom time to watch these videos. This can be a huge disadvantage in itself since some students might be reluctant to put in that extra effort, which means they will start the next lesson lagging behind those who had put in the effort to be prepared. 

While it can be difficult to encourage students to become self-directed, motivation can and is a strong factor to push students in the right direction. The teacher just needs to find the right trigger. If the teacher is persistent in driving home the idea that students need to self-directed, it also sets the right tone for them.

Uses

Educreations can be used to create any sort of video relating to anything from grammar rules to the four skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking. For example, a video recapping the structure in a narrative story - i.e. Introduction, Problem, Series of Events, Climax, Resolution and Conclusion - can be created. Or a video introducing the different types of figurative language like similes and metaphors could be uploaded as a pre-activity before the actual lesson of learning how to use them effectively to enhance one's ability to write creatively. The list is endless.

In Singapore's context

Being self-directed learners is what the Ministry of Education wants Singaporean students to become. Hence, Educreations would be a useful tool for teachers and schools to invest in, since it is a handy platform to create flipped classrooms which is a means for students to become more self-directed in their learning.

Conclusion

Educreations is a useful iPad app for teachers and it is easy to use. It will definitely help in flipped classroom content creation.