Gathering and keeping organized with our resources can be cumbersome, whether we refer to physical media like files, pictures, etc. or digital media like documents, images, etc.. The internet has provided a flood of information that can be overwhelming to juggle. Information comes from websites, articles, Youtube, Tweets, Blogs, and the list goes on. This information manifests itself into documents, images, videos, links, and a plethora of formats. So now that we have all this information, how do we remember what we’ve found when we need it? Brain overload is a real thing. What’s the point of finding the information if we throw it in the “junk drawer” to lose it just as fast as we found it.
Presenting….Wakelet. A curation tool that addresses this very conundrum. Wait! Curation? What is curation? According to Lexico Dictionary from Oxford, curation is “the action or process of selecting, organizing, and looking after the items in a collection or exhibition.” Well that seems to be exactly what we are looking for. Come on along with me and ride the WAVE – The Wakelet Wave!
Wakelet is an online curation tool allowing you to create “collections” called Wakelets for organization and easy access. These Wakelet collections allow for logical organization of online resources for easy retrieval when needed, or even sharing with co-workers or students. You can also follow other Wakelet users to learn and benefit from the content they are sharing.
Here are my top 10 ways to ride the Wakelet Wave.
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Curate resources on like topics
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Sort links, images, and documents from the various resources on similar topics into categorized Wakelets. This allows for easy look-up when needed. You can also share your collection as needed.
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Example link: Graphic Organizers; Podcast listing
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Curate resources to check out later
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Gather items of interest from Twitter, blogs, and more for later research. Cause you just don’t always have the time to look into everything as you find it.
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Example link: Twitter collection example
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Create student choice boards
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Create a Wakelet with choice-based projects by topic, standard, unit, etc and share with your students. Differentiating learning gives students choice and flexibility in their learning helping them stay organized and follow through efficiently.
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Example link: Choice board; Learning menu
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Curate tutorials and instruction sheets
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Sort manuals, tutorials, and the much needed “cheat sheet” directions that we collect and need to share with students or the teachers we coach. These tutorial items often take the form of text/graphical files, as well as video tutorials. Wakelets can be used to save and organize these tutorial collections.
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Example link: Create tutorial
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Team Collaboration/Class Collaboration
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Use to store and share plans, along with all of the necessary files, for collaborating with a team for planning a unit or an event. While a shared Google folder or other collaborative tool will accomplish this, Wakelet allows posting of different types of files in addition to standard docs and images. This is also a great use of Wakelet by students for group project planning.
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Example link: Unit plans & Lesson Resources
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Post parent teacher communications
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Post class newsletters or webpages to parents as well as archiving past posts for later referral. Provide a clickable link via email for parents to access your posts. This works great for back-to-school, meet-the-teacher, and student activities as well.
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Example link: This week at Donalda School
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Presentation Template/Digital Storytelling
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Create presentations with all the necessary files and file types placed in the order that they are needed for presenting. Use a Wakelet for placing the files for quick access. Students can create Wakelet collections for digital stories and projects as well.
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Example link: Student Presentation
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Lesson Planning
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Use Wakelet collections for organizing weekly plans for submission to administrators.
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Example link: Westward Expansion and The Exodusters
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Digital Breakout Games
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Use a Wakelet collection for storing clue sets and instructions for BreakoutEDU and other online scavenger hunt games
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Example link: You Shared What? Wakeout
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Data Monitoring
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Organize data for monitoring student progress for PLC (Professional Learning Community) meetings. Any data collections that need to be kept organized and shared is easily done with Wakelet.
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Example link: –How to use Google Forms
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There is such a wide variety of uses and ways to ride the Wakelet Wave! As I work to help teachers become more organized and work efficiently, Wakelet has truly helped me organize my own topics and presentations. Give it a try and share what has worked for you.
Follow me on Wakelet to get more detailed examples on this topic as well as many other educational technology topics. https://wakelet.com/@sv314dws
