Much of what we do in our teaching takes place behind ‘closed doors’. Part of the scholarship of teaching
and learning is about making teaching ‘community property’ - making our findings and practices public (Boyer,
1990; Schulman, 1993). Mapping and chronicling what is happening in the classroom is an important part of
knowledge creation, knowledge sharing and knowledge deepening. This is more than a map showing ‘what we did’
or ‘where we went’, but a meaningful artefact of the journey which informs ‘where we might go’. As Berstein and
Wert (n.d.) state:
When all the careful, difficult, intentional, and scholarly work of planning and teaching a course is
undocumented, it is lost for further use. Not only is it unavailable for the teacher's own reflection, but it is
not there for aspiring teachers and colleagues to learn from. (Bernstein & Wert, n.d., para. 3).
Part of the challenge in documenting teaching however, can also be tied up in documenting the learning taking
place. In that regard, the author was interested in exploring the following research question: How do we make
learning visible, in a way which serves as both a teaching tool, and a learning tool for both educators as SoTL practitioners, as well as students? Padlet is a free, web-based platform which allows users to populate a page with
images, documents, videos and so on in both synchronous and asynchronous environments. It is available via
https://padlet.com/ or as a free phone application for Apple and Android devices. As well as a learning resource for
students, it doubles as a neat yet powerful tool for SoTL practitioners in documenting their collaborative, interactive
and engaging teaching in an easily-shared format, which can be used as part of an overall teaching portfolio. Built
on over time, the final ‘product’ in itself can be copied and edited to suit other contexts. The author is a lecturer in
Learning and Teaching Enhancement in a European university. Each year, a number of visiting scholars from China
come to our university to attend intensive programs of study which involves development in SoTL practice,
integrated with an English Language programme. The author and her colleagues have experimented with the use of
Padlet while facilitating these visiting scholar programmes since July 2016. They found Padlet to be an invaluable
tool for resource sharing, facilitating collaborative work both in and outside the classroom and a way of capturing
learning in a visual way – giving the students a tangible, highly visual and easily portable portfolio which reflected
both a teaching and learning journey – capturing and chronicling their experiences via images, documents, videos
and various learning resources. The work captured on Padlet became both a memory of their journey in Europe and
through SoTL, as both scholars and learners. Reflections on the use of Padlet were sought from Lectures in Teaching
and Learning around the pros and cons of Padlet. This paper reports on these reflections and combines with
relevant SoTL literature which articulates creating meaningful and visible learning and teaching resources and
relevant applications of technology.