Preserving Results with Google Drive and Padlet

Think of Google Drive as a web storage with built in office programs. As such, it equips you and your students with everything that’s needed for your text or number based works – word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, posters, even surveys – you name it. It integrates much more apps, since it is capable of handling third party apps (try Audacity Online) and it has some unique features in their own apps through plugins.

The best thing, however, is the possibility to work together. If you share a file with other users, they all can open the file at the same time and see what everyone is doing in real time. Thus, you can watch your colleague working on your group assignment while you are just following their cursor and correct the typos. And if someone in a large group of collaborateurs happen to destroy your work, there is a rewind tool, that recovers the state of work on any given time.

Padlet is much less versatile, but it’s an expert in the one thing it does: being an online pinboard. You can very easily create one of different types of pinboards (besides some basic templates, there are maps and even timelines), give it a name easy to remember and share it. There are practical safety-settings so that it is possible to just show your own work to specific users or to let the world collaborate in a joint work (then your coworkers don’t even need to have an account with Padlet).

We used it to just collect and swap some personal profiles with the students from our partner-schools and to plan the events we were responsible for.