Padlet is a great tool which is popular around the University, the tool has also received a number of new updates over the last year or so which have added functionality and improvements to one of our favourite tools.
So relax in the lovely sunshine/rain and catch up on five changes that have been made to Padlet over the last year or so.
1. Expanded view for posts
There’s now an expanded view for posts, this means whenever you select a post on a padlet then it will open up into a larger expanded window, making it easier to view the content of the post. Then you can view a scrolling list of comments and reactions made to the post.
This makes it far easier to concentrate and explore a single post on a padlet and not get overwhelmed by a large number of posts as well as making it more manageable to read comments and facilitate discussions.
2. New look Padlet dashboard
The Padlet dashboard user interface has been altered allowing it to have a more streamlined view that makes it easier to organise and locate padlets. New tabs have been added for Recents, Bookmarks, and Shared so you can easily access padlets you have visited within the last 30 days, collect your favourites in one place and see the padlets on which you have been added as a collaborator.
The new dashboard also supports dark mode if this has been enabled on your web browser. Dark mode is a setting that can be applied to browsers which aims to have less white colouring and more dark colouring which reduces stress on eyes when viewing screens If you’d like to apply dark mode to the Chrome browser please see Google’s own guidance on dark mode.
Padlet now also allows you to add a cover image to each of your padlets, this makes it quicker to identify and differentiate padlets based on their own unique image. Any image used within your padlet can be set as the cover image, you just need to open up the post menu for an image and then select the Set as padlet cover option.
3. Leaving a padlet is easier
Parting is such sweet sorrow but it is now much easier! If you’ve ever been added to a padlet by mistake you now have the ability to leave, using the new Leave this padlet option that appears within the Share menu, this will remove you as a collaborator from the padlet and prevent it appearing within your Padlet dashboard.
If you’ve found there’s a bunch of padlets cluttering up your dashboard that are now redundant or if you keep getting added to colleagues’ padlets by mistake then you can now easily leave them.
4. Better tweet previews
Twitter can often be a useful resource to draw from as a teaching tool. If you add a tweet as a padlet post it used to previously just appear as a link, but now whenever a Twitter link is added then there will be a full tweet preview including any images and some preview text about the tweet.
5 Improved post menus
The post menu has been altered, with menu items for commonly used actions you might wish to do to a post, this includes the ability to open a post in a new browser tab, making it easier to view a number of tabs in detail or to organise posts using your browser.
Sharing Padlet posts also got a lot easier with the new Copy link to post option which allows you to copy a direct link to a post that can be shared with others. This can be useful if you want students to share posts with each other or if you want to link students directly to a specific post within a padlet
The final new option is the Copy direct link to attachment, this will only appear for links, images or files but allows you to generate and copy a link directly to a file rather than the post. This could be useful if you have a post containing a file such as a PDF and you want to directly share a link to said file and bypass Padlet.
More information and support
Hopefully this blog post has got you caught up to speed on some of the latest changes to Padlet, if you’d like to learn how to use Padlet within your teaching then please do explore our Padlet self study course, if you’ve any other questions, then contact us in Technology Enhanced Learning at TEL@sussex.ac.uk
