Thursday, July 16, 2015

Stop & Jot with Padlet: Turning on Digital Tools to Make Meaning Emerge Across People, Places

In a grade 5 e-book I am writing, I've integrated a few key digital response tools throughout the 6 units of study. One of those tools is Padlet. Padlet is a virtual wall that you and others can write on. What I like about this tool is its capacity to visually juxtapose ideas. I deeply believe in the practice of building community knowledge and Padlet is a tool that facilitates such composition.

One of the units of study in the e-book focuses on launching book clubs in grade 5.  To demonstrate a series of possible response tools that students might opt to use when they run their own book clubs, I model several tools using Paul Fleischman's novel, Seedfolks.  I show students how to use Stop & Jot while reading (based on Kyleen Beers & Robert Probst's notion of textual signposts). This tool could be limited to paper and pencil and there are of course times when such solitary thinking may well be important.  In the e-book I show how to make that tool digital by using Padlet. This allows for the process of attentive reading to happen across students and classrooms and time.  The tool then isn't just about what you as a reader have determined, but opens the door to seeing what others have named too and posting (if desired) responses to peers' work.  Through Padlet, something dialogic may well emerge.

And it is this sense of emergence that I am most after here.  That's the bigger content.

Below is a screenshot of a wall I made that contains a few responses that I wrote. All that is waiting now are other readers and their ideas. That's where the power of response becomes more attuned. Padlet allows us to name and highlight the spaces where textual intersections occur among and between people.


From M.A. Reilly's Padlet: Stop and Jot


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