Last week I posted a video with my top 5 tips for teaching in a hybrid classroom with in-person
students and remote students in the same class at the same time. A few people commented that they
were skeptical whether or not my ideas would work in their classrooms, so I decided to put together
a playlist of videos to show you how it can. So stick around, because in this video I’m going
to show you how to run a live, synchronous lesson through Padlet in your hybrid classroom. If you're
new here, my name is Sam Kary, and this is my YouTube channel for The New EdTech Classroom!
There are a couple of key ideas I'll be showing you in this video. One is how to
use Padlet as a digital workspace that students can enter regardless whether or not they are
physically in the classroom or coming in to class virtually. The other is how to use Padlet to run
a synchronous lesson where you have control over the pacing of how the lesson progresses.
Although I do recommend that you make use of stations, and flipping your classroom,
and other asynchronous teaching techniques, there will of course be other times when you want to run
your class synchronously and that's what I'll focus on in this video. The best Padlet board
for controlling the pace of a lesson is the Shelf. After selecting the Shelf, give your lesson a name
and then be sure to turn on attribution and commenting. You might also want to select the
option to approve student posts before they’re posted on the board. If you want to learn all
the nuts and bolts of how to use Padlet, be sure to check out my other Padlet video by clicking on
the link above. You can see that in the Shelf you can create columns for organizing posts
instead of just having posts scattered across the board. As I mentioned, you can use these columns
to control the pace of the lesson. For example, you could set up columns for the Engage, Explore,
Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate phases of your lesson, or if you prefer, the Do Now, Direct
Instruction, Group Practice, Independent Practice, and then an Exit Ticket. What you’re seeing here
is an actual lesson I recently taught in a 5th grade hybrid concurrent Maker’s Space class.
The entire class is always run fully online from a single laptop, and every student logs into Google
Meet to start class. This lesson was also the first time students used Padlet as well as Google
Drawings all year, so notice how I also build in some organic teaching of how to use these tools
into this lesson. Our goal for this two day lesson was to engage students in a small design project
to help them prepare them for a larger project that they would be doing in our Maker's Space
using the 3D printer and laser etcher. For the final assessment of learning, students
designed drink coasters that communicated something about their personalities,
and then actually printed a physical coaster using the laser etcher and 3D printer.
To kick off the lesson in the Engage phase, I had students respond to the Do Now question:
“What do you already know about coasters?" and "What types of coasters have you seen before?”
For your lesson, you could replace this question with any other prompt that gets students to make a
connection to the lesson or share prior learning. Next, for the Explore phase of the lesson,
I made a column called “Coaster Observations” and posted different images of coasters.
For direct instruction, I briefly modeled my own process of making objective observations about
a coaster and then had students post their own observations in the comments below each image.
To encourage deeper thinking, I always follow up observations with a round of inferences, so in
this case I asked students to infer why a person might choose to own one coaster over another,
as well as how the coaster made them feel. After students wrote their comments,
I cold called on them to unmute themselves and share what they had written. Moving on to the
Explain phase of the lesson, students started applying what they had learned about coasters.
I quickly modeled how to use the internal draw tool in Padlet to sketch my own coaster design,
narrating what I was intending it to show about my personality. Then students drafted their own
coaster designs, as a follow-up activity. By the way, if you're finding these tips valuable,
be sure to hit the like button and subscribe to my channel and let me know in the comments below what
tech tools you've found most useful for hybrid teaching! In the next column, the Elaborate phase,
we moved on from drafting to actually creating final versions of our coaster designs. I included
a link to Google Drawings and quickly modeled how to make a cut drawing for the actual coaster shape
that they would need. If you were doing this lesson asynchronously,
you could always use the screen recording tool in Padlet to record a video explaining what to do,
rather than teaching it live. Then I also showed students how to share the file directly to
Padlet using the link tool so we could later print those out with the 3D printer. As the last step
for finishing our coasters, I used Google Drawings to show students how to create their more detailed
drawings that would end up being etched on the top of the coaster with the laser etcher. During
this part of the lesson, students were working for the longest amount of time independently,
but it didn’t necessarily need to be quiet time, so rather than just leave my screen up,
I cold called on students to have them share their screens for a few minutes at a time. Implementing
a “sharing your screen protocol” helps you better understand what students are doing well and where
they need additional support, and it also gives students the opportunity to explain their thinking
to the rest of the class, to ask questions, and allows you to reinforce instructions since,
as you know, many students won’t necessarily understand what to do the first time around.
Then once students finished their drawings, they also shared those back to Padlet. For the Exit
Ticket, we had students post what they enjoyed about the lesson to close on a positive note.
Throughout the week we used the laser etcher and 3D printer to create actual models of the
coasters and then took time the following week to do a virtual gallery walk so everyone could see
what their friends had created. Let me give you a quick pro tip here. I’d suggest you set up a
“Master Copy” of your lesson ahead of time so that you can reuse it over and over again.
After you've set up your lesson, click “Remake” so that you'll get a second version of your document,
delete everything except for the first column, and then just build your lesson during class based
on the master copy you've already created. That will also give you the benefit of being able to
reference that master copy again and again in the future. And if you only have the free version of
Padlet, you can always just archive it to free up more space and then unarchive it later when
you want to use it. I hope this video helped you better understand how you can use the Padlet Shelf
to pace your hybrid lessons, as well as continue to do rigorous, meaningful, engaging work with
students. If you want to learn more about how to teach with Padlet, be sure to check out that
playlist above. All the strategies I show in those videos could be applied regardless of whether or
not you're teaching remotely, in person, or in a hybrid classroom. And if you want to learn
more about how to use technology strategically in your classroom, be sure to check out my 21st
Century Classroom online course. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video!