Rockfig – ‘Pininterest for Education’

Rockfig has been described as a ‘pininterest for learning’ (@merlinjohn) as it enables you to collect together lesson resources and media in a single location. The Rockfig website also enables you to browse resources sets put together by other users making it a great tool for quickly identifying useful resources for your subject area. Everything is organised by age, National Curriculum subject and topic making it quick and easy to use.

You can create your own collections as well as store your favourite collections from the user community and you are also able to share Collections on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and by Email. Subjects currently supported are, Chemistry, Biology, Chemistry ,Physics, ICT, Computing and Maths with more subjects coming soon.

How to view a collection in Rockfig

How to create and share a Rockfig collection

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Padlet and Padlet Backpack for Schools

Padlet enables communication and collaboration between multiple computers and devices and therefore facilitates collaboration within the classroom and between staff and students. Essentially it is an online collaborative bulletin board but it has great potential for use as an educational tool; open ended questions can be posted to ellicit discussion and debate through student responses or collaborative research can be undertaken with findings shared in one area.

I have just started trying padlet with classes for homework activities. For example one of my Year 9 groups have been asked to each research a particular volcano and they will then share the results of their findings on the padlet wall shown here to build up a collaborate resource showing some of the worlds major volcanoes.

The uses of Padlet in the classroom are widely documented and the two videos below give useful overviews of the educational potential of this tool.

Padlet Backpack for Schools

The new Padlet premium version for schools looks like a great tool – Padlet Backpack for schools gives a greater degree of privacy and has no social media features. Teachers can create student accounts and have complete control over them with regards to what they can can’t do. Student accounts don’t require an email. You can your own school logo and either use your own domain or get your very own subdomain. As it is on its own domain the school IT department can block access to the open padlet.com whilst maintaining access in school to your Padlet Backpack version. Features on their way soon also include integration with LMS, Google apps and Edmodo to enable login without setting another password and content filtering. A 30 day free trial is available. Further details can be found here.

Padlet have created a number of video tutorials to support the use of Padlet Backpack School, including…

How to signup and log in to your Padlet Backpack School

How to import your padlets into your Backpack account

Adding your school’s logo to your Backpack account