What Changes When Every Student Can Post: Padlet

One link can turn a room full of quiet faces into a living wall of ideas. We sit down with Dr. Carlos C. Goller, teaching professor in Biological Sciences at NC State University, to break down how Padlet actually works and why it has become such a reliable tool for student engagement, collaboration, and active learning.

Carlos shares real teaching and workshop use cases, from brainstorming and scavenger hunts to collecting tutorials for molecular biology and bioinformatics. We also dig into underused features that make facilitation easier, like sharing a Padlet as a submission form for private video reflections, then using reactions, ratings, and sections to sort and surface what matters.

If you teach in a hybrid or online learning environment, you’ll hear why Padlet can help participation feel fair and visible across Zoom and the physical room, including options for anonymous posting and built-in moderation. We also cover accessibility improvements.

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Transcript

Meet Dr. Carlos Goller

Host 0:29

Today I have with me Dr. Carlos Goller. Dr. Carlos C. Goller is a teaching professor at NC State University in the Department of Biological Sciences. He has been at NC State since 2012 and is passionate about biology, educational research, educational technology, accessibility, and microbial genomics. Dr. Galler enjoys walking with his partner, Dr. Claire Gordy, in the genetics program here at NC State and learning about new Delta workshops and opportunities. In his free time, Carlos Goller has fun with his two kids, Amada and Aurelio, two guinea pigs, one hamster, and one dog. Carlos, that's a lot of animals at home.

What Padlet is and what it does

Dr. Goller 1:09

It is. It keeps on expanding.

Host 1:12

Well, today we're here to talk a little bit about an amazing tool that we have. If you all have not heard, we now support Padlet here at NC State. And so it can be integrated into your courses. It's a tool that you have full access to. And hopefully, this episode will give you a little bit of an insight into how you can get started with it, what you can use it for. And so grateful to Carlos for coming on and talking a little bit about this amazing tool. So, to begin, how would you define Padlet?

Dr. Goller 1:46

Padlet is a really interesting tool. It's a digital bulletin board and also a sandbox where you can share, for example, texts, digital post-its, and multimedia in what I would describe as free form. It's really easy to create a Padlet from scratch or use a template and share it with others. You can share it with students by sharing the URL. You can customize the URL. You can share a QR code too. And I've used it for both online synchronous and asynchronous sessions with both students as well as educators, faculty at workshops. We just finished doing one where we used Padlet. And this afternoon, I'm actually using one with a good friend of mine, Laura Lawrence from Princeton, and we're going to try one of the new features of Padlet: a sandbox and breakout room links.

Host 2:53

I love it. I love that you just recently used Padlet, and now we're recording an episode about Padlet. That's always so fun. Padlet is amazing. And I want to mention something that you talked about a bit. There are two different features in Padlet. So you have the Padlet boards, which are going to be those traditional bulletin style Padlets where you can change the formats, but it's all going to be on this wall. But then you also have a sandbox, which is much like a digital whiteboard. It closely relates to Google Jamboard. So it's not an extremely robust digital whiteboard. But I think that's one of the things I love about Padlet. And I love that you mentioned that it is easy for anyone to use. So it's not just one of those tools, another tool where there's a huge learning curve. You have to prep your students for it. You have to really brace them for this big, sophisticated tool that's going to be in their courses. But it's as simple as sending a code and it's pretty straightforward as to what students are expected to do when they're dropped into line.

Boards Versus Sandbox Whiteboard

Dr. Goller 3:55

Laurel was telling me for this workshop this afternoon, she wanted to have participants. In this case, they are educators from community colleges, think about how they implement teamwork in their classes. And Laurel was saying, I wish I could have more than one Padlet. And I said, I think what you need is a sandbox. And she had used Jamboard before, and Laurel said, "Well, I've never used this." And in a matter of five minutes, she was able to add different pages, use a template, there were animated images there. It all came together really quickly. And and Padlet has made it easy for people to create new pages using templates or just searching for the image that you want as a background.

Host 4:55

Yes, that's really awesome. And that's one of the things that I think is the best thing that's going to come out of this session today is that if you are interested in using Padlet, you can jump straight in. So I know you talked a little bit about what it is, but you know what it is because you've used it before. So tell us a little bit about how you're using Padlet in your course.

Dr. Goller 5:17

I'm trying to think about when I started using Padlet. I have been using Padlet for years. I am probably not the first user in our household. So my partner, Claire Gordy, used it way before me, and way before we had an institutional agreement. I've been using it for several years. I love how easy it is to share boards and create boards. I use it mostly to have participants in classes contribute to brainstorming, sharing ideas, maybe sharing resources. We could do scavenger hunts or explorations. Here's the question. Go find some resources, and they can include YouTube videos. I've done it for molecular biology classes where I had a question on a method, and people would find tutorials to help others understand. And this goes beyond lab-based activities or techniques. We've also done it for bioinformatics. Students can easily provide comments, reply to each other. You can set it to do ratings or likes. And that has been really useful to have it sort if you do columns or grids, sort posts based on the number of likes. Just earlier this week, we had as part of a faculty mentoring network, FMN, I used one of the features, which is share a submission or a form link. And the link prompted people to record a two-minute video reflection on what they learned this semester at a group of instructors and how are they going to implement it. And we've got comments back saying it is super easy to record a video.

Using Padlet in Real Classrooms

Host 7:24

Yes, that's a really cool feature. And you know what? I don't think that that's one that we talk about very often. But essentially what Carlos is mentioning is one of the sharing features that you have when you create a Padlet is to share it out to folks as a submission form. And so what essentially happens is they don't actually get access to the Padlet itself, but instead they get a personal version of the submission form. So same way you add something to a Padlet board, you get one of those on your own, and then you submit to the board without actually seeing the board. And so that's actually a really good use case. And I don't think that I've heard many of those.

Dr. Goller 8:05

No, and it was my first time doing it. This was was this one was with instructors. And I did it by accident in terms of I did not realize they wouldn't see other posts before submitting. Yet they worked really well because that way each of the video submissions was very different.

Host 8:28

Yeah, I mean, what a lovely thing to stumble up upon, right? I love that. I love that. You also mentioned a couple of the other things like "liking". They actually just added another feature to the- I think they call them reactions. They have emojis now. So now you can have- instead of like readings or stars, if you want to get something more creative or say students are doing some type of introductions, they now have emojis. And so that adds a little bit more fun to the board too in situations that call for it. You did talk a little bit about the different formats that are available. So essentially, in a board, when you create a board, you then select what type of format you want. And there are a couple of different formats, and essentially they're just ways to organize your board, whereas grids and columns organize parts of your board by section, and then you can add things to certain sections. Freeform is more like putting anything anywhere. And so that's really good for creating mind maps or brainstorming and then connecting ideas later. And then they have really cool ones like Timeline and Map, which I don't get a lot of use cases for a map, but I would love to start hearing how folks might use that one. But tell me, Carlos, what are your go-to formats that you're currently using?

Dr. Goller 9:45

So I typically use sections and I like having columns or the grid. That helps. I will mention that I've used, and this is the royal I because it's a team of us. I've used the we did a series of webinars with the Open Ed Association, and our first one used, I believe it was the map, to have people tell us where they were from.

Host 10:19

That's a great idea.

Dr. Goller 10:20

That was really neat to see how people were posting different things and adding different likes. And I usually use sections. I use sections to have, for example, a prompt or a part of an activity. And I've been doing that for several several years now. If there's a before or during the experiment and then after, or for case studies we had with Carly Sjogren in biotechnology, we did one where they would learn about a scientist who happens to be a good friend of mine, Jason Williams from Cold Spring Harbor, and then we had a Padlet and it had sections with questions, and then I would share it with Jason, and Jason would respond to some of the questions the students had, which was really neat.

Host 11:16

Yes.

Dr. Goller 11:17

One that I've seen used, I'm still impressed with how this happened. A gain, going back to the -open-ed group, and the this is all Aisha and Nicole Allen, but they've been using Padlets during our community webinars to gain input on what priorities should the association have and how can we reach other people. And then at the open-ed conference, they did a hybrid session where they had different sections for different questions or priorities or areas of interest. There were about 50 people in person, and there were 150 people online on Zoom. And it was amazing how that how the sections filled up. And one thing that's nice about having everything in one Padlet, we were able to jump back and forth, go back to the previous section, and add more thoughts. And that that Padlet blew up or exploded with ideas in a matter of 20 minutes.

Host 12:28

That's amazing, especially because we all know how hard it is to support a hybrid environment, especially when there's a lot of online participants.

Dr. Goller 12:39

Right. There were more online participants in the room. I think from what we could tell, we had engagement from both.

Host 12:50

Yeah. That's fantastic.

Dr. Goller 12:52

And in that case, Padlet was used as a guide because the slides were mostly for the in-person attendees. Everyone had access to the Padlet from the beginning, and you could follow along and share your thoughts. And the other thing is that some people wanted to share anonymously, and Padlet allows you to do set it up that way, and it comes up with really cool weird names.

Host 13:25

I think most of them are like animal-based names, like magnificent giraffe or something like that.

Dr. Goller 13:31

And so, yes, so we found ourselves saying the magnificent giraffe or the happy author responded this. Right. There are also tools for moderation, both manual and automatic. I haven't been using it as much. I accidentally left it on once, and you get notified if you have to moderate. The automatic one is really good, actually. It flagged something that was just word use. It wasn't offensive, but it was nice to know that there's a system in place that would filter out a response.

Host 14:16

Yes. That's one of the AI features that it has. And so I'm really happy to hear that that's something that you like and it's working pretty well because you know we never really know unless we actually put it into practice. I almost always keep the auto moderation on because it's just better to have that safeguard, especially if you have a large class.

Features and Tools

Dr. Goller 14:35

Yes. And they did, I think, they did change the default settings. So now the default, I believe, is auto.

Host 14:45

Oh, good, good. If I were recommending it to somebody, that would be a good place that I would want to start.

Dr. Goller 14:51

I think manual was a little tough because over the summer I did one and I left it on manual. And I did not realize that the posts won't appear till you accept.

Host 15:03

Right. And, you know, if you do want to do the thing where you don't want students to see before they post, then that takes us back to the submission form where you have different ways of going about sharing the board in a way that, you know, students can make their own unique post, but then they also can still see what's going on inside the board. So it's nice that this is not a tool where moderation is the only way to manage how students approach the board. And that's really nice.

Dr. Goller 15:32

And that reminds me of our really fantastic and powerful LMS integration tools we have. Because, for example, you can provide instructor personalized feedback without making an open post on something.

Host 15:52

Yes.

Dr. Goller 15:53

On someone's post. You can take attendance or participation with it. There are some really powerful board creator instructor tools, including freezing the board at a certain date or providing specific feedback. And I just discovered that this semester and thought there was several tools that I'm gonna use from now on.

Host 16:22

Yeah, it makes it really easy to not only manage the board, but also to still have your voice heard without having to be the one to lead the pack in a way. You know, like in a lot of situations, we want students to be the ones who are facilitating their learning. We want them to construct that in a lot of ways. And that helps with that because you can still have a voice, you can still be present, you can still give that necessary feedback to students without actually having to lead the conversation or start a discussion. That was actually our next question was talking about some of your favorite features or settings. And so I love that you talked about the grading features. I love that you talk about the LMS integration. It actually pops up right within the LMS if you need it to. And so you don't even have to navigate to Padlet in order to participate in a board if you're a student. But we also have the option that if you do want to, you can use it both inside the LMS and outside of it. And so I'm really happy that you're kind of seeing that it's easy to use and it's something that has features that are actually beneficial to you.

Dr. Goller 17:26

And in addition to helping students easily click on it and be able to participate and get credit for it, one of the features that I thought I would not be interested in, yet I found myself using at the conference, was having people participate and then using the play feature, which allows you as the board editor to display the board piece by piece. And we were able to highlight the relevant certain posts as well as how it came together as with input from all attendees. And I think I want to use that feature more often in class for debriefs and so on.

Host 18:15

Yeah, and you know, we talk about this all the time in our workshops, and it's one of the arguments that we have for why use digital tools in general. And it's the fact that you can take it with you, and it is a place where these things live. And so, like your example where you were crowdsourcing ideas from your students, like the example where you were in that hybrid situation and there were so many ideas in this board from so many amazing experts in the field. And then just like your example just now, that is something that you can give to participants, give to your students, and they have something to look back at and keep up with the conversation and reflect on and even use in the future if they want to. So I really think that's the best part of it and why we always recommend to use a tool like this because it's not just a single use. It can be used for a very long time.

Dr. Goller 19:07

I absolutely agree. And one that I'm going to hopefully use next semester is for gallery walks, or in the case of undergraduate honors, sharing posters on a digital board. So make a Padlet where we all get to see each other's posters and provide feedback.

Host 19:32

Oh, that's going to be really cool. I was thinking that when I first saw that it had the ability to upload images, the ability to upload videos, and the play feature. I thought, you know, this will make gallery walks really easy to do in hybrid or online environments where it's not as easy to just simply walk around a room. And it's a great way to have a kind of like class portfolio in a way too. So I actually really love that idea. Speaking of the video and images, I love the fact that you can comment with video and you can make a post with video or with audio.

Dr. Goller 20:10

Yeah, I used it this past week with instructors. And now that I know how easy it is to create a form and share the link. And Padlet just released some video editing. So now you can trim your video or you can, for example, cut segments out. I think it's really powerful. And it has robust options. I believe it's 10 to 30 minutes.

Host 20:43

Yeah, it's pretty awesome. So, from your perspective, how could Padlet change the way students participate or collaborate in your courses and how can you see it being a good addition to mini classrooms?

Hybrid Engagement And Moderation

Dr. Goller 20:56

I think it makes it visible for others how you're contributing to a learning community. By being able to interact with, read, vote, comment on other posts, it helps you, for example, learn from others as well as obtain feedback. I think that hopefully helps include more teamwork, for example, some more peer feedback and support in classes. And I also appreciate that it's a tool that can be integrated with the LMS and can also be independent. We can have people interact with it and contribute throughout the semester. I've done the cues for a class and people posted questions, posted, for example, resources they found useful, and now there are some AI image generation, AI speech options that help. Padlet has done a lot when it comes to accessibility. Years ago there were some concerns, and now you can navigate with the keyboard with keyboard shortcuts. There are options to enhance color contrast and and font size, videos get captioned. It's making it easier for all students or as many as are willing to engage. And now it hopefully is less of a barrier in terms of how they can interact with each other and what they can share. Now they have options of what they can share, and how they can interact with each other can be from a simple comment to maybe a like. There are several ways to show that and demonstrate that you're engaged with the content and others in your class.

Host 23:08

Yeah, that's always a good thing. And that's exactly what we want. And interacting with your instructor through feedback and commenting and even instructors reacting or posting to the board. So I think that's really amazing. And it does, I think you said the first time, going beyond the LMS, going beyond the course, but really truly building that classroom community and humanizing it a bit because we're all just people and all just sharing our ideas and all just sharing our research and what we're learning with one another. More of a learning community.

Dr. Goller 23:40

And in addition to it being a community engagement platform or tool, Padlet has some neat features for organizing projects and notes. We were just talking about how can we organize a project without using a dedicated software like Trello or Asana. And now Padlet's tables and fields, you can create a table with designated fields including checkboxes, emails, you can share it with your collaborators. We've created a Padlet where we have rows for tasks and everyone can contribute. They are really customizable tools.

Host 24:29

Yeah, it's one of those things that you can kind of do anything with for sure.

Dr. Goller 24:36

Some of us love collecting digital artifacts like Pinterest. Well now, Padlet has this extension called Mini Padlet. It's a Chrome extension and it lets you click on a page and send it to your Padlet board. So you can have a Padlet board to collect items.

Host 25:00

That's really cool. Just making it so much easier to use it, so much easier to have more use cases and and still sharing, you know, ideas and great things that you find. I think that's really cool. I have not checked out the extension yet, but I'm definitely going to have to because that sounds like something right up my alley. So you know, we talked about all of the amazing features, we talked about all the things that I can do and how customizable it is, but I also don't want to make it seem like it's something that can't be done, because all of that can sound kind of overwhelming. So if you are to recommend this tool to a colleague or someone came up to you and said, I'm really curious about using it, what advice would you give them and where would you tell them to kind of start?

Dr. Goller 25:48

I think my advice is going to be similar to what I do with WooClap, another tool I really love. Padlet has a user-friendly YouTube channel and guides. And their guides happen to be in the form of Padlets. And they are short guides. You can complete them. They have YouTube videos that are short, half an hour workshops or highlights of key features. Every time they release a new feature, just last week, there was a webinar on features they had they had just posted. And that gives you some use cases and an idea for how they are using Padlet. And they also have a really comprehensive collection of Padlets that people have shared.

Padlet at NC State and Next Steps

Host 26:46

Yeah, that's one of the best features, I think, because they are examples, but then you can also use them yourself. And so there's a way, they call them recipes, but there's a way to take a recipe and actually look at one that's already been created, but then you can also do something called remake, where you can create your own version simply making a copy of it, and it'll give you a blank version of that template too. So that's really awesome. And it's funny that you said all of their help articles are Padlets. Well, all of their sessions are also Padlets. And so they use the Padlet Play feature to run all of their sessions as well. And so they do have a really robust support system as a whole. And I really, you know, defer to a lot of their short and sweet videos all the time. But yeah, I think that's really good advice. If you're interested in using Padlet, say you're like Carlos and you've been using it for a long time and you already have an account, but it's just a free account, there are ways for you to transition into our NC State license, which will give you access to unlimited Padlets. That was something that Carlos was happy to do. And other of our faculty that we've already talked to who were already using Padlet and we're very excited about transitioning over. So if you haven't heard that we have a license now, please reach out to LearnTech at ncsu.edu and we'll be happy to help you with that. We also have a lot of support through Delta. So we have already run several Padlet workshops and have recordings on those. We have a teaching resources article that covers information on Padlet and a lot of knowledge base articles that can support you in getting started and helping you get within that license if you need to. So, Carlos, I just want to say thank you so much for coming. I love that you came on to talk about Padlet, even while you're still learning all of the amazing things that it can do. But just sharing your expertise in general has just been fantastic to hear.

Dr. Goller 29:05

My pleasure, and I'll quickly mention that because of the Padlet agreement we have, there's an NC State Padlet community,and if willing, you can share your Padlet on the community page. And once in a while wander around and check out how others are using Padlet.

Host 29:13

Yeah, they're doing amazing stuff. I love going in the, I think it's like the community dashboard or something like that. But yeah, it's very cool. And it's a very easy way to share what you're doing with others and with your colleagues. So say you work with other people in the same department and you all want to share Padlets. It's a very easy way to just drop it in the community pool and then everybody can use it. So that's a really good point and really helpful for those that are just getting started and trying to figure out what I would use this for.

Dr. Goller 29:42

Right.

Host 29:43

Well, thank you so much. Be sure to come back if you would like and talk about other amazing tools. I know you're such a champion of all of our tools, but we really appreciate you talking about palette, especially because it's still on the newer side.

Dr. Goller 29:56

Absolutely. It's fun.