Getting Started with Padlet for Collaborative Learning

Padlet is a flexible digital bulletin board that transforms passive classroom activities into interactive, visible learning experiences. Students contribute posts in real time, teachers moderate the board and the whole class can see ideas building collectively — from any device, with no student account required on the free plan.

What Is Padlet and How Does It Work?

A Padlet is a shared online space where participants add text, images, links, videos, voice recordings or drawings as individual "posts." The teacher creates the Padlet and shares a link or QR code; students open it on their phones, tablets or computers and begin contributing immediately.

Posts can be arranged as a wall, grid, stream, shelf, map or timeline — making Padlet adaptable to dozens of different classroom activities from brainstorming to sequential storytelling.

Creating Your First Padlet

Sign up at padlet.com with your school email. On the free plan you can create up to 3 Padlets at a time — delete old ones to create new. Click "Make a Padlet," choose a format (Wall is the most versatile starting point), give it a title, choose a wallpaper and decide on your privacy settings.

Set the post approval setting to "Require approval" if you want to moderate contributions before they appear — particularly useful with younger students. Enable "Profanity filter" as an extra safeguard.

Classroom Activity Ideas Using Padlet

The most popular uses include: Exit Ticket walls where students post one thing they learned before leaving class; KWL charts using a Shelf layout with Know, Want to Know and Learned columns; gallery walks where student work is posted and peers leave sticky note comments; and collaborative research boards where groups each contribute to a shared topic wall.

The Map format is particularly powerful for geography and history lessons — students pin events or locations with contextual notes. The Timeline format supports sequencing activities in science and history.

Sharing and Embedding Your Padlet

Share your Padlet via link, QR code, or by embedding it in Google Classroom, a class website or a Canva presentation. Padlet generates a compact QR code you can project or print on a worksheet — students scan and are taken straight to the board.

Export completed Padlets as PDF, image, Excel spreadsheet or as a shareable archive link — useful for keeping a record of class discussions or displaying student work in parent newsletters.

Tips for Managing Student Contributions

Give each student (or group) a specific colour or ask them to include their name in their post — Padlet shows the author name by default if students are logged in, but anonymous guest posts are common. Use the "Like" or custom reaction feature to facilitate peer voting on ideas without discussion. The teacher dashboard lets you hide, delete or reorder individual posts without disrupting the live view for students.