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Friday 27 January 2012

Popplet & Google Sites PD Session

This morning I participated in the Tech Showcase at Brock University's Hamilton Campus as a presenter on using Popplet and Google Sites.  It was so exciting to interact with teachers, principals and other teacher candidates and share with them the exciting things that Popplet can do not only for their students, but for them as well.

Popplet is a web 2.0 tool that you can use to explore and share your ideas and thoughts via a concept map.  The great thing about Popplet is that you can add videos from YouTube, images (from Flickr, Facebook, or your computer), draw pictures or simply write text all directly within a popple (or a bubble).  Popplet is also very collaborative in that more than one person can be working on the Popplet at one time (collaborative learning!) via a sharing with a collaborator option.  Once the Popplet is finished, you can easily embed it onto a Google Site which is a great option for sharing your finished product.  But it doesn't just stop there, Popplet can also be downloaded in .pdf or .jpeg format to share offline, it can be posted directly to Twitter or Facebook, the link can be copied and shared AND you can e-mail your finished Popplet to friends.  To show the session participants we created a Popplet entitled All About Popplet, to share the things you can do in visual and text (concept map) form.  For the handout we

There are endless opportunities for Popplet in the classroom, whether it be for the students or for teachers and principals as well.  Personally, I used Popplet for my first placement to organize and plan my entire Grade 5 Science Human Body unit.  I found that this was useful in terms of backwards design because I knew what my culminating activity was going to be and could figure out how my students were going to get there and be successful by the end of the unit.  I am also a very visual person, so I found this helped me to actually see all of the different body systems I wanted to cover (or lesson focuses) and thus create different lessons off of those focuses to help the students gain knowledge.  I also found it was easier for me to plan out how many lessons I would need to finish the unit before my placement was over!  Overall, I believe that Popplet is very useful because unlike other concept mapping programs, this web 2.0 tool is available to students after they leave the school at the end of the day and it is also collaborative which is a critical skill that our 21st century students need and want to use in their learning.

The handout provided to the Technology Showcase participants


3 comments:

Kyle Horst said...

Let me know if you every need a designer's point of view on Google Sites. Thanks for the great article.

Unknown said...

I've been searching everywhere for these instructions.

I've tried them, but it inserts a blank page rather than my popplet. Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

Stacey said...

Hi Alfina,

Sometimes, depending on the amount of content in the Popplet, I have found it takes a bit for it to load and may appear as a blank page at first. Is it loading at all or always a blank page?