What is Padlet: all you need to know about this innovative, collaborative tool

Padlet makes active participation in the classroom easier and encourages collaborative work in an intuitive, simple, and engaging way.

It is an educational tool that leverages Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to enhance students’ learning experiences while promoting innovation in the classroom.

If you are an educator — or someone looking to boost collaborative work and motivation within professional teams while fostering a sense of shared responsibility — we invite you to discover what Padlet is and how it can be used.

We will walk you through practical examples to help guide you in implementing it effectively.

What is Padlet?

Padlet is an online interactive platform that works as a virtual post board with a simple and user-friendly interface that promotes active, creative, and collaborative learning.

It lets users post, store, and share content in multiple formats, either individually or in groups.

This collaborative tool helps users build a learning space in minutes, thanks to its visual organization features. It allows real-time participation between teachers and students who can post educational content as if using sticky notes.

You can create various types of collaborative boards with materials like documents, creative collections, portfolios, image galleries, or video libraries.

To get started with this collaborative tool, visit the official website or download the free mobile app for Android and iOS smartphones or tablets.

How to use Padlet in the classroom

The best way to understand how to use Padlet in the classroom is to explore what both teachers and students can do with it.

Padlet for teachers

Padlet is a highly versatile educational tool that helps enhance teachers’ digital competence. It allows educators to create engaging multimedia content for students through a variety of ready-to-use and customizable templates covering all kinds of topics.

One of its greatest advantages is that all resources can be collected and organized in a single place, made interactive, and accessed by students at their own pace — even allowing them to download materials.

Teachers can manage student permissions and adjust privacy settings to create safe and respectful learning environments.

In addition, Padlet offers different levels of automatic content moderation, giving teachers the ability to oversee their class’s posts.

This makes it possible to evaluate student progress in a centralized way, monitor their development, and provide constructive feedback and suggestions that guide each student to take ownership of their learning journey.

This educational technology also enables teachers to collaborate with colleagues and develop interdisciplinary projects that give deeper meaning to students’ learning experiences. Furthermore, the content can be exported in various formats for further use.

With Padlet, teachers can:

• Organize the school calendar so each student has easy access to daily activities.
  
• Create lesson libraries to promote ubiquitous learning or provide academic reinforcement.
  
• Track student progress by inviting them to actively participate in their learning using columns such as “What I know,” “What I want or need to learn,” and “What I’ve learned.”
  
• Encourage collaborative and independent work in the classroom.
  
• Build positive, student-centered learning environments where individuals or groups can learn at their own pace and take on personalized challenges.
  
• Enrich the curriculum with activities, personalized learning paths, and more.
  
• Set up learning stations that turn the classroom into a dynamic and interactive space.

Padlet for students

Students will find this interactive platform to be a practical and engaging tool that allows real-time interaction, voting on options, adding comments to posts, creating polls, and more.

They can upload all kinds of content collected from the Internet or their own devices — text files, audio clips, videos, images, and more.

This makes it easier to prepare projects and presentations, organize teamwork and co-creation, and helps students work independently while developing key skills like creativity and responsibility.

By using this collaborative tool, students can:

• Create portfolios that reflect their daily or weekly progress
  
• Add homework and track their pending assignments
  
• Launch brainstorming sessions to support group work, share ideas, explore different perspectives, and enhance critical thinking
  
• Take part in discussions on specific topics to enrich their projects or express concerns
  
• Design fun, original newsletters to share milestones or achievements
  
• Build visually appealing presentations that boost creativity and innovation
  

As you can see from this list, the possibilities with this virtual post board are nearly endless.

How to use Padlet

Using a Padlet board in the classroom is very simple. Just register for free on the official website and start creating your first boards. The free version lets you create up to three boards and also allows you to be invited to collaborate on other users’ boards.

You’ll find plenty of templates to format your first digital collaborative board and enhance your lessons.

You can design spaces with content bundles, mind maps, blog-style sequences, or even chat-based exchange formats.

Each Padlet board can hold as many posts as needed, in all types of formats.

Basic steps to get started with Padlet boards:

• Create an account using an email (Google, Microsoft, Apple, ClassLink, Clever, or a custom domain). After confirming your email, you’ll be asked to set a secure password. The process is simple. You can stick with the free version or choose from the available plans. If you’re an educator, you may qualify for an educational plan.
  
• Start your board by choosing a template that suits your needs and how you want to organize your content. Layout options include columns, grids, lists, storyboards, maps, and more.
  
• Customize and set privacy settings (public, private, or limited to a select group).
  
• Add content by clicking the “+” icon. Each time you do, you can create a note. You can assign it a different color and drag it around the board to organize it visually.
  
• Invite students or fellow educators to collaborate and assign specific permissions for viewing, commenting, or editing posts.
  

When it’s time to share your Padlet board, you can do so through a direct link or QR code. You can also send it via email, WhatsApp, post it on social media, or embed it into a virtual classroom.

One major advantage of this interactive platform is that it integrates seamlessly with the most commonly used Learning Management Systems (LMS).

Padlet examples: 9 use cases

The best way to understand everything this collaborative tool can offer is through practical examples you can apply directly in the classroom.

Research labs

Collaboration in digital environments is highly engaging for digital-native students. This virtual post board is perfect for building a shared research center.

For example, use the column layout so students can add updates on different aspects of a shared lesson topic.

This provides a centralized space where students can review findings, prepare presentations, and add new tasks as they go.

Concept map

The layout called “canvas” lets users freely organize ideas by connecting posts with arrows and lines.

This format is ideal for building concept maps that show relationships or hierarchies between key ideas.

Classroom debate

A simple way to manage debates is by choosing the column or shelf layout. Present a discussion topic and create three columns: pro, con, and neutral.

Students add their arguments or evidence, improving their clarity and critical thinking while ensuring all voices are visible — supporting more inclusive classrooms.

Content curation for group projects

This interactive platform is excellent for content curation. Students can search, organize, and filter information to produce relevant, high-quality materials.

It also helps improve how content is presented to meet the needs of a target audience or specific project goals.

Project-based learning (PBL)

In education, this tool is synonymous with cooperation. It allows users to add and edit content, comment, personalize the layout, and export or share posts.

You can assign one Padlet board per group so they can collaborate in real time — whether in class or remotely.

Student portfolio

Each student can have a personal board to collect valuable information throughout the course.

As a teacher, you can leave comments or add extra materials to enrich their learning. This setup supports scaffolding and is ideal for formative assessment, reducing pressure on students.

Roadmap for spaced repetition

One of the best strategies for long-term memory retention is spaced repetition. This involves reviewing learned information following a systematic schedule that’s tailored to the student’s needs or the subject matter.

A technique you can implement with Padlet is the Leitner box system, which is based on creating several boxes, each labeled with a specific review frequency (daily, every 2–3 days, weekly, etc.).

On the platform, each student creates a column for each box and adds the information they need to review. This can be done using flashcards or simple digital cards, with one question per post, for example.

As students review the material, if they know the answer, they move the post to the next box. If they answer incorrectly, they move the question back to the previous column — or if it’s in the first one, they leave it there and start the cycle over again.

Idea, knowledge, and result exchange

Another way to use the educational platform we’re discussing is as an agora — a space for exchanging ideas and/or results to encourage peer feedback.

It can also be very useful for requesting improvement suggestions on others’ work, receiving encouragement, helping to resolve questions, and more.

This type of interaction strengthens the sense of teamwork and helps develop skills such as empathy and trust.

Class news board

As a teacher, one of the biggest challenges you face is communicating effectively with your students. The level of trust you build with them will largely depend on this.

You can use Padlet to create a news bulletin to inform your students about project deadlines, content updates, contests, recommended readings, or films and series that can help them improve their skills, among many other possibilities.

Reading club

A book club can be a fantastic way to encourage this habit among your students and motivate them, even when the readings are mandatory.

Again, organizing by columns will be very helpful for you to list the books you plan to cover in class.

You can include interesting facts about each book, its author, and the historical period, and allow your students to add comments or ask questions they would like to discuss in class.

These are just a few examples of how to embrace educational innovation with Padlet. Ideally, you should explore the app and tailor it to fit your own workflow.

What skills does Padlet help students develop?

Using this interactive platform in the classroom helps students build and improve strategic skills such as the ones listed below:

• Collaboration and teamwork: Multiple students can contribute to the same Padlet board in real time, helping projects move forward efficiently.
• Communication: One of the key strengths of this collaborative tool is how it promotes shared work. It encourages students to develop clear, concise written and verbal expression while keeping content well-organized and free of ambiguity.
• Critical thinking: This tool is also valuable for structuring debates, analyzing information, and developing a problem-solving mindset.
• Creativity: Timelines, maps, image galleries, multimedia walls — this virtual post board offers many options that allow users to express their creativity.
• Idea organization: Since students can easily add and rearrange content, it’s a great resource for learning how to logically and attractively structure ideas.
• Digital competence: It provides an easy way to begin navigating digital environments and also enhances technical skills. Students learn to upload files, include links, and manage images, videos, and audio.
• Autonomy: Each user can publish and manage their own content independently and at any time, supporting continuous, flexible learning.

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What active learning methods can be combined with Padlet?

This interactive platform includes features that support active methodologies — teaching strategies where students take an active role in their own learning process. One of the most popular is project-based learning (PBL), which we’ve already discussed.

In addition to PBL, here are four more active techniques you can implement using a Padlet board:

• Gamification: You can add game-like elements to encourage student participation and learning, such as points, badges, challenges, image-based contests, polls, and more.
• Flipped classroom: Students can research topics outside of class and use the board to visually and interactively organize their findings, reversing the traditional learning model.
• Experiential learning: Students can use the virtual post board as a digital field journal to log discoveries or share them with teammates in collaborative projects.
• Challenge-based learning (CBL): Present engaging challenges to your students using Padlet and encourage them to solve them independently or in groups.

In all these approaches, allowing students to leave comments and share feedback during the activity helps you improve your content strategy and identify what activities engage them the most.

How to encourage collaboration and participation in class with Padlet 

If your goal is to improve collaboration and participation in class, the first step is to promote effective communication among your students.

This interactive platform is a powerful tool to create spaces for sharing ideas where students feel heard. It enables visual, instant communication and active interaction.

Before using it, clearly explain to your students how Padlet will be used in class, what their role will be, and how they are expected to participate in each activity.

To help you build a culture of constructive feedback, here are a few suggested guidelines to create a shared code of conduct for using the Padlet board:

• Use respectful language
  
• Express ideas clearly
  
• Give constructive feedback
  
• Ask open-ended questions
  
• Acknowledge others’ contributions
  
• Practice active listening and reading
  
• Provide clear, precise, and achievable instructions
  

Present this list to your class and ask them to suggest what else should be included. Involving them will increase their engagement and sense of responsibility.

Benefits of Padlet in education for teachers and students

Throughout this article, you have seen how this virtual board offers a wide range of possibilities for both educators and learners. The result is a better learning experience and greater motivation, which often leads to improved outcomes.

To wrap things up, here are the most significant advantages of using a Padlet board in educational settings:

• Encourages active student participation
  
• Supports collaborative and inclusive education by enabling feedback and exchange
  
• Enhances digital literacy by helping users work with different file types
  
• Makes it easy to classify and organize content and resources
  
• Improves personalized education by adapting content to each student’s needs and helping them shape their learning path
  
• Simple, flexible, and versatile with strong customization options for any subject, strategy, or project
  
• Builds effective, engaging communication between teachers and students, and among peers
  
• Promotes values like collective responsibility and respectful teamwork
  
• Multilingual (available in over 45 languages) and compatible with all devices
  
• Integrates with LMS platforms such as Moodle, Canvas, Blackboard, 2DL, Google Classroom, Edmodo, Microsoft Teams, and Schoology
  

Using tools like Padlet in education encourages students to engage actively, creatively, and collaboratively. It enhances the learning experience through personalization, interaction, and dynamic content.

More importantly, it helps create more inclusive and equitable classrooms. Evaluations should align with these values to ensure a balanced educational experience.

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You can request a free demo with no commitment. We’ll show you how our solutions can help your assessments comply with current security and data privacy regulations — building student trust in the process.