Using Padlet to "Tweet" in the Classroom

For several year, I have had students in my International Relations class "live" tweet the Cuban Missile Crisis over the course of its 13 days. I have done this assignment on Twitter for the past three years. And I liked doing it on Twitter. But Twitter had its hassles. I wasn't comfortable with insisting that students sign up for a social media account to do an assignment. And ironically, a I had a bigger problems with the students who already had accounts because I was asking them to assume the personal of an important person from the crisis. Within Twitter, setting this up was hard if students already had an account.

This year, I decided to make a Padlet Wall to do the same thing. Look, I gave up the look and feel of Twitter when I moved this project from Twitter.  It would really look good. Here's a screenshot.




But Padlet was far easier to set up. We simply logged in with Google credentials, temporarily changed our names in the settings to the name of the assigned character and then "tweeted" away.
Take a look. I was pleased by the results.