12 Days of Christmas Wishes — Part 12 — Teachers take control

I made an investment in a company called Padlet recently. If you aren’t a teacher, you have probably never heard of it. If you are a teacher, you probably have. Padlet has been growing like a week for a couple of years with millions of active teachers now. It’s a simple premise, teachers need good tools for putting together their lessons, presenting them to students, giving students practice and quizzes. It’s a beautiful visual app. The thing that made it take off is that they allow a teacher to bundle up all of the parts of a lesson into one thing (a ‘padlet’) and share it with other teachers. As you can imagine, teachers share their lessons a lot, causing padlet to grow.

What really interests me about the company though is that they continue a trend which goes directly against the type of top-down curriculum picking that states and districts have been making for teachers for years. Instead, teachers are building and sharing their own resources. I saw this first with pdf files shared with teacherspayteachers. Other tools like Nearpod have vibrant market places of teachers sharing and selling lesson content. Could padlet take this even farther with a one stop shop for teachers to build and share what they need?

The reason I like this is that I think it’s impossible to tell a teacher how to teach. They know their students better than anyone. It is far better for us to measure outcomes and principals to intervene if things aren’t going well, but otherwise, let them do their job and pick the approach, tools, and content they want for themselves. Of course, schools and districts keep the money locked up, so free and virtually free tools like padlet will do better. But maybe some day, everyone will realize that telling teachers how to do their job doesn’t benefit anyone.

If you are building something that enables teachers to build and share their own content, send me an email -john@danners.org. I would love to help!