From Tiles to Tools: My PLE Now

 

This post shows how my Personal Learning Environment evolved this semester. I start with my initial Symbaloo and explain what it helped me do. Then I embed my current board and justify the main changes that make it more task oriented.

Initial PLE

At the beginning I built a practical board with tools I already knew. It combined organisation (Moodle, Google Classroom, Google Drive, Office, Blogger), discovery and input (Google search, Wikipedia, YouTube, BBC resources, SlideShare, Vimeo), language support (WordReference), practice platforms (Kahoot, Quizlet, Duolingo, Wordwall, Educaplay) and creation tools (Canva for Education, Genially, Adobe, Scratch, Blender). This setup was fast and familiar. It worked well to find resources and to run short activities. However, it did not make the task cycle visible, so I often jumped between tabs to move from input to production and then to assessment.

Current PLE

My current PLE is organised so I can move in one place from explore to design to produce to assess. Creation and evidence are now more central: Canva, Genially, Pixton and StoryJumper for production, Blogger for publishing outcomes and Excel plus Classroomscreen to manage time, instructions and results. I also integrated interactive comprehension and live decision-making through Mentimeter and LyricsTraining. For authentic input I still rely on BBC and YouTube.

What changed and why

The main change is intentionality. Instead of many generic links, I now keep fewer but purposeful tools that push students towards a visible product. Playful practice remains with Kahoot, Quizlet, Wordwall and Educaplay, yet those platforms are chained to a product students can share in Padlet or Blogger, or create with Canva, Genially, Pixton or StoryJumper. I added Mentimeter for quick checks and decision making and I use Excel to register evidence. Some tiles that duplicated functions or created noise were archived. Social and media apps can serve as sources for media-literacy tasks, although I prefer to keep them on a separate personal webmix when they are not connected to a lesson.

Planning is quicker and outcomes are clearer. A typical sequence is: authentic input from BBC or YouTube, an interactive check with Mentimeter or LyricsTraining and a product that students publish or present. Evidence is easier to collect and feedback is more specific, because tools for creation and assessment live side by side. The board is now a map of decisions rather than a drawer of links.

I will keep refining tiles and grouping them by workflow: explore, design, produce, assess. I also plan to embed Edpuzzle to turn videos into graded checkpoints and to use Padlet as the default space for peer feedback.