Online Collaboration with Padlet

Over the past several weeks I’ve had the chance to participate in a couple online conferences and lead hands-on tinkering activities through zoom. As well, we’ve finished the first six weeks of our Cabaret Mechanical Theater ‘tinkering with automata’ course. While it’s becoming more and more comfortable to engage with tinkerers online, we’re still working to figure out the best way to share and collaborate with each other in the virtual realm.

For us, one of the best tools we’ve tried is Padlet, an online message board that allows people to post photos, videos, comments and links in several different formats. We’ve used it in slightly different ways depending on the workshop, but in all contexts it seems to be a flexible tool for collaboration.

A couple weeks ago, I led a light and shadow play workshop at STEAMconf 2020, a conference that normally takes place in Barcelona. The conference took places using a webcast software that didn’t allow the participants onscreen so it was really important that people had the chance to share their projects. Before the session, I set up a wall on Padlet and after some time of playing around with the materials, we encouraged everyone to take a photo and post it on the page. This was a great way to allow people to see the wide variety of tools and techniques possible when exploring light and shadow.

In a Fab Learn workshop that I led last weekend with Saskia Leggett and Angelasofia Lombardo, we did a chain reaction activity. For the Padlet page, instead of putting the photos/videos in a bulletin board style arrangement, we used a timeline to give the impression of each contribution following the next. It was really fun to be able to zoom in on each sections and in a way worked even better than the documentation in a normal recap video.

And for the Cabaret Mechanical Theater course, we are experimenting using Padlet as a home base for the entire course. We’ve built a landing page with embedded Padlets linking to important resources, artists inspirations and boards to share projects and ask questions.

There are a lot of tools available for sharing online (I’m interested to explore more with Mural and Mentimeter) but Padlet remains a good choice for tinkering collaboration because of it’s flexibility, ability to use without signing up or paying for a new service and compatibility with many different file types. While nothing will measure up to a carefully curated cabinet of curiosities or just going around a room and talking about projects and ideas in person, we keep experimenting with tools to make the activities as collaborative and open as possible even at a distance.