Padlet perspectives: Archer’s Digital Bulletin Board reduces emails, not routinely checked
Photo credit: Emma London
Hannah Joe ‘21 checking the Digital Bulletin Board. The board contains five different categories of announcements that any Archer student or faculty can post on.
Before administration announced the Digital Bulletin Board at the start of the year, freshman Shaunael Milton had an email inbox “clogged” with lost and found emails and club meeting notifications. The new Digital Bulletin Board limits the number of emails sent and provides one place for announcements.
“I got a ton of feedback from students and faculty about the number of emails that go out,” Dean of Students Jenn Babin said. “Over the summer, I worked with communications and tech to think through some different possibilities for how we can communicate and get messages out to the community.”
The solution devised was the Digital Bulletin Board, which is powered by an interface called Padlet. According to its website, Padlet “make[s] beautiful boards, documents and webpages that are easy to read and fun to contribute to.”
Any Archer student or faculty member can write a post for the board. Selected faculty sort through the posts that have been submitted and approve them to be added to the Padlet. Depending on the type of announcement, the post stays on the Digital Bulletin Board until a faculty member takes it down.
“I check it two to three times a day,” Gracey Wyles ‘21 said. “If I have a club I want to go to or there’s a school announcement that isn’t so pressing that you have to send an email, but is something that we should know, if I’m not checking frequently I’ll miss it.”
The categories of announcements include special events, daily reminders, club announcements, community service, team updates and the lost and found.
“It’s a good resource to have rather than using email,” Milton said. “I also appreciate how there are all the colors and gifs you can put on there, and it just makes it more fun.”
However, some students do not check the Digital Bulletin Board routinely, or in some cases at all. Remi Cannon ’24 explained how her friends use it for club notifications, but she “[doesn’t] find it useful.”
“For me, because I’m not in too many clubs, I just don’t really use it. That’s the only reason,” Cannon said. “Nothing from it really applies to me most times because I check my email a lot.”
Babin said one of the purposes of the Digital Bulletin Board was to recreate the feeling of a physical bulletin board.
“I just leave it up on my desktop at all times and look at it from time to time,” Babin said. “I think it’s useful to have one visual place where you can keep all of that information.”
A survey of 224 randomly selected middle and upper school students with 92 responses found that 50 percent of students polled responded that they believe the Digital Bulletin Board is a good resource for the community. However, only 22.8 percent of students polled reported regularly checking the Digital Bulletin Board.
Babin said that she has been hearing students do not regularly check the Digital Bulletin Board and that the administration is working on a solution.
“I was brainstorming with the deans, and what we realized is that you can download the Digital Bulletin Board as a PDF,” she said. “Maybe what we can do is once a day someone sends out the ‘here’s what’s on the Bulletin Board’ sort of thing so that way, if people aren’t looking at it directly, they still have easy access to all that information in one email instead of 20 emails.”
Emma London joined the Oracle as a correspondent in 2017 and as a staff writer in 2018. She is on Archer's equestrian team and plays the viola in upper...
