One of the reasons I love to teach teachers is that they’re always introducing me to new tools that support learning and instruction. My student Katy Jain just introduced me to WallWisher. I love it. It’s an interactive post-it board for ideas. Free. No login required. And it works.

Here’s how Katy used it. She created a wall in WallWisher where  her online science students could make explicit their background knowledge about cells. She asked them to post answers to two questions: (1) What do you know already about cells? (2) What do you want to know about cells? This is a classic (K-W-L) type of activity but I love the simple yet powerful affordances of this tool. It’s immediately visible to everyone. It’s on the cloud. It’s editable by many simultaneously and it’s grounded in good learning theory. What a great way to build schemas!

How might you use this tool in your own teaching? Ideas welcomed!