Reach into the Toolbox #8
Wallwisher in an online noticeboard which can be filled with ideas, thoughts, notes, opinions, facts etc by everyone and anyone. It’s a bit like sticking post-it notes onto a big sheet of paper. You can also post links to pictures, videos, Powerpoint presentations, spreadsheets and PDF documents.
If planning to use the site with a number of classes, it’s best to create an account so that you can keep the walls you have created. You can do this using your normal email account or if you have a Google log in, you can use that too. The beauty of this site is that students do not need log ins as they can post on the wall by simply double clicking on it and typing on their post-it note.
As the owner of the wall, once you are logged in, you can change the colour scheme, move posts, edit posts and you can opt to moderate each post before it’s posted on the wall. You can make your wall public (for everyone to share) or private (only you can see it). If you have created a public wall for your class to use, once the activity is over you can reset it to private so that no one else can post to it. The wall will be saved in the list of “My Walls” in your account so you can revisit it at a later date.
I’ve used Wallwisher in class and have set homeworks based on it. When using it in class I found there was every possibility that pupils would choose the same position on the wall to write their post-it notes. When this has happened, not all of them have been displayed however a quick screen refresh solved this and pupils were able to choose appropriate places to stick their post-it notes. Also, as owner of the wall, I was able to move posts around so that all of them were displayed properly.
An alternative to Wallwisher is Linoit - works in a similar way with similar features. I haven’t explored Linoit yet and look forward to doing so in school so I can accurately compare the two. Watch this space…..
More next week
Claire
