How to use Padlet

All right in this tutorial we are going to be learning about how to use a program called Padlet. Padlet is essentially an online bulletin board where you can post all different types of media and then you can also have conversations with your classmates by adding comments below their posts. You’ll notice here on this Padlet that I am not currently signed in and even if you are not currently signed in, you can still use Padlet. Now your teacher might ask you to create an account and the reason why they would do that is so that you can use some of Padlet’s features that you wouldn’t be able to use without an account and once you create an account, you’ll see that your name will show up on the top of posts that you make. So, to create an account, you’re going to go up here to ‘Sign Up.’ You can sign up with either an Apple email, a Google email, a Microsoft email, or you can enter a separate email and password. Make sure that you’re using your school email here. I’m going to sign in with Google, since that’s my demo account information. I’ll click on my Gmail account, then I’m going to choose the basic membership. You’re not going to be expected to pay for a Padlet account. 

Okay now that we’ve created an account, let’s go ahead and get started. Typically, teachers are going to post the instructions for what they want you to do on Padlet directly underneath the title of the Padlet or you may also see that the teacher posts the instructions in a post that they already created. So, you’ll see here that your teacher has already posted something to the bulletin board in order to introduce you to the assignment. So, in this case your teacher posted some text as well as a GIF.

One thing that you’ll notice before you start to create your own post is that your teacher has enabled commenting. So down below, you could write a comment. Keep in mind that your teacher can turn off comments and can also delete comments, so you want to make sure that the comments that you leave are appropriate. When you’re ready to comment, go ahead and click that arrow and then you’ll see your comment show up and you’ll see your name above the comment as well. When you’re ready to add your own post, go down to the bottom right hand corner of screen and click the ‘Add’ button. There you’ll see that a blank post pops up. If your teacher is asking you to write something, you’ll want to include your title and then write your text below.

You’ll notice on your teacher post that your teacher posted a GIF in addition to the text and really, it’s this ability to add different types of media to Padlet that makes it so great to use. So, you’ll see here that you have some options. You could upload something from your own computer if you had it. You can also embed a link. So, if your teacher is asking you, for example, to include a link to another website, all you would need to do is copy the link and then you could paste that link directly into your Padlet. The option that you’ll probably use most frequently is just the option to do a search on Google for some different types of media. You’ll see that it auto populated the same search term as the title of your post. So, let’s say you wanted to actually show that you really like basketball. So, you’ll see once I enter the search term ‘basketball,’ that some different images about basketball are going to show up and I could also check to see if there are some GIFs about basketball as well. Okay so let’s say you wanted to add something like this GIF. You could click on it and then it’s going to show up directly beneath your text. Once you’re ready for your post to show up on the board, go ahead and click off of it and then it’s going to be there for everybody in your class, as well as your teachers, to see. That’s the bare-bones basics of Padlet. There’s a lot more you can do with it, however, so stay tuned for some future tutorials where we’ll talk about all the different types of media you can add to your Padlet as well.