Tools for Content Sharing and Collaboration: Padlet, Flipgrid

Stop recommending it. Microsoft retired it. The site went to view only in July 2024, it closed on 30 September 2024, and content still there was deleted the following day. Anyone who did not download in that window has lost it.

The part that matters for your materials is what survived. The camera and basic editing moved into Teams for Education. The discussion and peer response features, which were the reason to use it for introductions, did not. So the migration exists on paper and does not do the thing you were using it for.

Take the whole line out rather than swapping in another product name. What the activity actually needs is a way for people to record a short clip and see each other's. That can be a shared space in the platform you already run, or something as ordinary as each person sending a clip that the mentor collects with permission. Naming a specific free service in printed materials is what got you here.

Fair. We also use Padlet a lot and I would rather not repeat the mistake. What should I be checking there?

Two things, and neither is about whether the tool is good.

First, the free tier is capped and the cap has been changed before. Check Padlet's own support pages for the current limit before you design an activity that assumes one board per mentee, and design so that hitting the cap is an inconvenience rather than a collapse.

Second, and more important for this group: a padlet is a shared surface. Whatever a mentee posts is visible to everyone with the link, and links get forwarded. For women who have reasons to be careful about being findable, that is not a small detail. Decide in advance what the board is for, say plainly who can see it, and keep anything personal out of it.

The general rule after Flip: before you build a programme on a free tool, ask what happens to the content if it closes, whether you can export it, and whether you would still have a programme without it.