Quality-of-life improvements for school admins

It's the first week of school. The middle school gym teacher just resigned, a family of raccoons has taken up residence in the science lab, and someone accidentally unshared the roster file for the entire district. 847 students can't access their assignments. Parents are calling. Teachers are panicking. IT says it'll take two days to fix manually.

You wake up, heart racing, already mentally composing emails to IT support. Then you see your phone: July 15th, 2:47 AM. Just a nightmare. But the roster disaster feels real. In fact, it’s probably happening to a school administrator right now.

We've been working on improvements to make these nightmares a thing of the past. Here's what's new for Padlet for Schools.

Rostering disasters now have a reset button

When schools accidentally unshare rosters—it happens more often than you'd think—entire districts can lose Padlet access instantly. Previously, restoration required gathering user data from the school, then running custom scripts to restore access. Restoration used to be a complex, time-consuming process.

Now, Padlet support can run a single command to restore access to all users removed by rostering. We also added the ability to download a CSV of all users before enabling rostering, so our Customer Operations team can verify exactly who will be affected before running a sync.

New interal rostering controls include the ability to for Padlet Support to download user data before syncing and easily disable rostering if needed.

Automatic LMS course syncing eliminates manual UserGroup setup

In an LMS, UserGroups allow teachers to share padlets to a whole group of students with one click. Previously, creating UserGroups required Customer Operations to work with teachers for each group. Each UserGroup meant individual conversations, manual configuration, and opportunities for miscommunication, multiplied across every class in a school.

Now, when school admins configure their LMS, groups are automatically created, populated, and updated. We automatically invite users, add them to libraries, add them to UserGroups if they're in an LMS course, and remove them from UserGroups when they're no longer enrolled.

One technical challenge: while LMS platforms generally follow the LTI specification, each implements certain features differently. For example, Canvas uses rotating subject IDs for users. This required us to build special handling for grade passback when students unenroll and re-enroll. Some LMSes needed custom configuration for automatic permission requests. We built platform-specific handling while maintaining a unified experience for schools.

Better performance for teachers with extensive libraries

Teachers with hundreds of padlets couldn't effectively use our LMS integration. The interface would time out trying to load their full collection. We rebuilt the deeplink wall selection to support high-volume users and now display the 100 most recently updated walls where the user is a builder or admin, ordered intelligently.

We also improved handling when LMSes don't provide proper camera or microphone permissions. Instead of showing a generic error, we now direct users to open Padlet in a new tab so they can continue with their assignment.

LMS integration now automatically syncs courses and displays the most recently updated padlets for easy assignment.

Other quality-of-life improvements

Grade passback fixes: Resolved edge cases with LMSes using rotating subject IDs and improved automatic permission requests
Name synchronization: User names now update automatically when added to school libraries via LMS or roster
Security enhancements: LMS configuration URLs are now proxied through our secure infrastructure
Better assignment naming: LMS assignment names no longer override Padlet names automatically
Improved alerts: Less noisy notifications for LMS course syncing with better edge case handling
Streamlined user management: School administrators can now search for multiple users at once by separating emails and usernames with spaces or commas.

Search for multiple users at once by separating usernames and emails with commas or spaces.

Coming soon

We're adding an organization-wide toggle for AI features, giving admins granular control over which tools are available to their users. Plus, we will continue improving the user management page for admins, including an edit user info panel where library owners and admins can modify a user's name, username, avatar, password, and library role, plus view join dates and last activity.

All of these improvements are available now for Padlet for Schools users. If you're managing educational technology and want to see how we can simplify your workflows, contact our team—even at 2:47 AM.