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App Smashing With Popplet

Popplet, Popplet Twitter, Popplets in Education / By

Educators and learners can achieve a lot using a mind mapping tool like Popplet. Popplet’s easy-to-use interface and its powerful features allow Popplet users to immediately capture their thoughts in several different ways. They can then organize and share this information using Popplet’s powerful editing and collaborating tools.

Having so many features, an indefinable age group for its user base, and as well as being useful for practically any task means Popplet is definitely considered one of the app world’s true all-rounders, making a name for itself outside of education, in business, as well as for personal use. In spite of this Popplet is still a favorite when it comes to App Smashing activities. Isn’t this what every job requires: A committed team player with the ability to work on their own initiative? That’s Popplet.

Here are some examples of Popplet’s favorite App Smashing partners and some of their activities.

Seesaw

Seesaw is “a platform for student engagement” and definitely one of Popplet’s besties! With Seesaw, students create learning portfolios which they can share with other students, teachers, and parents. Not simply a place to store work, students use Seesaw’s impressive array of tools to create videos and add voiceovers to their Popplet work.  Seesaw list Popplet as a compatible app and there’s even an App Smashing activity on the Seesaw website.

 

Number Pieces

Number Pieces has a web and iOS version and is totally compatible with Popplet. “Number pieces help students develop a deeper understanding of place value while building their computation skills with multi-digit numbers.” As well as place value and simple computational tasks – adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing – early-years students use Number Pieces Basic to represent smaller numbers, and then store their creations in Popplet.

 

Twitter – @poppletny

Just in case you haven’t already noticed, Popplet and Twitter get along very well indeed. Twitter is the thee social media platform when it comes to sharing Popplet ideas. All of the examples in this article are taken from Twitter. Students under sixteen never post. Fortunately for us but their teachers do, often prolifically, for which we are very grateful as it gives us and their fellow educators a constant stream of new ideas.

 

iPad Cameras and Editing Tools

A Popplet App Smashing article would just not be complete if we didn’t mention the iPad cameras and their functions. All you need to do is snap an image and it’s immediately available to add to any popplet by pressing export then save JPEG.

If you want to add your image to a popplet right away press

On the popple’s toolbar and you’ll be given to option to snap a photo and have it added straight into the popple:

The iPad’s powerful in-house editing tools give you many different opportunities to change and annotate images before you add them to Popplet.

You don’t have to add your images to Popplet right away. You can snap as many as you like and make an informed choice later just like Sara Shafran’s first-graders did on their “learning how to observe nature” activity:

 

Pages

Apple’s document creation app is another favorite of Popplet users and is often to be found in writing activities. Popplet is usually employed in the planning of writing tasks. The “writing plan popplet”, which can contain images for meditation and inspiration, is inserted into a Pages document as an image and the budding scribes use it as a reference. It’s not only about images, quite often students fully plan their writing projects using Popplet, whatever medium they use. The group below did all their planning digitally but chose to write the traditional way.

https://twitter.com/InspireTooHJS/status/1171013079733346304?s=20

 

Keynote

Apple’s flagship presentation tool, Keynote, is as likely to be found in the classroom as the conference room, a bit like Popplet. When developing the skills of future digital citizens, it’s better that they gain experience with apps of this caliber. Year 6 at Howard Junior School have been doing just that! In this example, the students began with the fictional book, Holes, by Louis Sachar. Then they went out and done some digging of their own, created popplets from their results, and finally created non-fictional reports using Keynote. Phew! Well done guys.

 

PicCollage

A single popplet can only hold one image. The regular solution is simple: create another popple! However, that’s not always how it goes because some learners want more than one image per popple, and if they use tools like PicCollage, they can have this. Like all of the apps featured here, PicCollage is a superb app in its own right and well worth a look, even if you’re not planning to use Popplet with it.

 

Flipgrid

Flipgrid is an amazing app that encourages discussion between teachers, learners, and even parents. Users respond to each other by adding short videos to which they can add presentations. Flipgrid users use Popplet as well as many other apps in their video presentations. More often than not, questions are set by the teacher and students respond. But peer to peer interaction is what really makes Flipgrid special. We love it, take a look for yourself.

 

Voice To Text

Not an app as such, but there are apps out there with this feature. Mostly they employ the microphone button on the keyboard of any iOS device – that’s correct, students don’t even have to write any more to add text to Popplet! Of course, we are not discouraging writing development, but sometimes, when one is dictating directly, or the opposite –  in a stream of consciousness mode, using a text convertor is frequently more productive.

We are sorry to all of those apps that learners happily App Smash with Popplet that we haven’t mentioned – there are a lot more but we only have a thousand words! If you want to see more App Smashing or more Popplet ideas join the Popplet community on Twitter and don’t forget take a look at our Facebook page. If you like what you see, you know what to do.