One Purpose, Many Uses

Whoo! It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about anything, really. My apologies. But fellow writers will understand that when one overcomes writer’s block, one finds it extremely difficult to do anything other than write. And also, when doors open others close. Not much exciting stuff has happened – I really haven’t had anything to blog about. Which is why I doubt this will be an interesting post (at all) but if you wish to read something of mine that I am desperately churning out just to give you something to read, for those of you that are active followers of my blog, then keep on going.

Recently, at school, we had to create a Glogster poster about ancient civilizations. Glogster is a sort of blog-virtual poster hybrid that allows you to put text, videos, graphics, photographs, timelines and more onto this one page poster that can be created and accessed completely on the website.

However, as soon as we were finished with our Glogster project we were immediately taught an almost identical site called Padlet, which lets you choose a background and then allows you to put little ‘post-its’ all over it, like you’re taking notes or something.

So, if you weren’t putting much thought into it, you could say that they were identical, or at least very similar. You might even say that one was pointless because the other existed, or something along those lines. And that’s not really true, at least for me, because when you look closer they are so much difference even though they originally had the same exact goal in mind – to help take notes and organize data and information.

My teacher suggested I use Padlet to help organize my chapters and the events in them for my new book, Golden Hour. I thought that was a really great idea and I instantly knew I would not be able to use Glogster for anything like that, because Glogster has a lot more elements. It’s basically only for school purposes because there’s so much you can do with it that it would be nearly impossible to use it for anything other than educational purposes. It’s overwhelming, the things you are able to do with it.

With Padlet, you don’t even need an account. You simply press a button and start, which allows you to do almost anything about any topic, regardless of whether or not school requires you to.

I’m not trying to be biased between the two, believe me. But anything you want to do can be achieved by either one.

I guess what I’m trying to prove here is that when you dig a little deeper, you can make undeniable connections between two things that seem completely different and irrelevant to each other at first. And this doesn’t just apply to two note-taking, information-organizing websites. It applies to anything. As they say, your brain makes connections that are sometimes unnecessary. But it also makes wise, smart, educated connections that you probably won’t pick up on at first.

So, yeah. I hope you learned something from this. And if not, that’s okay too.

- C V SUTHERLAND