A Platform for Partnership: A Technology Review of the Padlet sharing platform.

Technology is in every aspect of modern life at present day and, to an extent, just navigating 21st century HE life already makes you ‘tech savvy’, however when looking to technology to assist student-staff partnerships, colleagues need to take practice beyond Microsoft Office, Social Media and Photoshop. During a student-staff partnership research project, a student and Higher Education professional used the online platform Padlet as a means for collaboration for a research project, on a mutual platform, to possibly replicate Healy’s principals of partnership such as; inclusivity, reciprocity, trust, and community (Healy et al 2014). Padlet has seen a large up-take by lecturers in HE as a platform to make debates accessible to a whole class or facilitate a seminar or open call for questions in a large audience. This free product is often used in small sections of teaching sessions, within lectures to spark conversation, show differing opinions and engage students, however this review intends to explore and evaluate Padlet’s other function. This paper will offer a review of the platform for student-staff partnership projects to inform future use to hopefully move towards Healy et al.’s attributes. Learning within collaborative online spaces is increasingly popular in education (Wheeler, 2009b, xiii) and Bound and Prosser famously state that ‘learning does not occur in isolation, peers influence it’ (Bound and Prosser, 2002, 239), which is certainly more possible than ever before.