Today I’m sharing how I’ve used the free app Popplet Lite in my classroom.
Popplet allows students to map out their thinking and create visual graphic organizers. I’ve used it across multiple subject areas and grade levels. It’s so user-friendly that even a kindergartener could use it with minimal assistance.
In reading, we’ve used Popplet for various skills such as sequencing, retelling, story elements, cause/effect, and vocabulary. In the picture below, my second graders are creating Popplets to retell the main events in their stories. They took pictures of pages in their books using their iPad cameras and then wrote short blurbs underneath each picture.
Here’s an example of a vocabulary map my students created using Popplet. They would find a picture of their vocabulary words either from a book or the internet and insert it along with the definition, part of speech, and the word used in a sentence.
Popplet can be very helpful with brainstorming or prewriting activities. Here’s an example of how we used Popplet to describe a special object from home before writing about it.
Popplet can also be used to help visualize tricky math concepts. Below, you can see how my students created a Popplet to represent a number in standard, expanded, and word form as well as with base 10 blocks.
The free version of Popplet only lets you create one Popplet at a time, which was always fine for us since I would have my students save their Popplets to their camera roll to send to me.
