By: Matt Rhoads, Ed.D
Dr. Matt Rhoads is a Tech and Instructional Leader and Innovator with hands in Adult Ed, K-12, and Higher Education. He is the author of several books and is the host of Navigating Education – The Podcast.
Do you want a place to save links, social media posts, videos, and images that can be curated and interacted with by you and your students? If so, Wakelet is a great free tool where this can take place. On Wakelet, you and your students can create, curate, and organize content together to amplify the learning experience within any classroom setting.
The goal of this post is to introduce Wakelet, its uses, and resources to help you put it into action for yourself as well as with your students.
Ways to use Wakelet & Getting Started
Wakelet has many different uses to amplify your work and instruction with students. Take a look at them below before taking a deeper dive.
To begin your journey using Wakelet, here is a ten minute video outlining its features and how to use them.
Using Wakelet as an Organization and Content Curation Tool
One important way to use Wakelet for yourself is to curate and organize your content.
- If you want a series of websites where they have templates you like to use, you can drop them into a collection.
- If you want a series of video resources, you can keep them grouped together in your collection.
- If there was a series of resources dropped from an educator on social media, you can include their posts on your collection too.
Additionally, you can place the links to all of your important documents and slides you’ve created on your Google Workspace.
Also, you can share your curated and organized work with your colleagues for collaboration, which is a really cool feature. Here’s a short two minute video showing you step by step how to share your collection.
Using Wakelet with Students
There are many ways to utilize Wakelet with students. Present below are a number of strategies integrating this tool.
- Collaborative Brainstorms
A great way to collaboratively brianstorm with students is to create a new blank collection. Then, determine what you would like your students to brainstorm and collect and curate information. To do this, create a topic and then invite students to the blank Wakelet collection. You can share the link to the collection via Canvas, Zoom, or email. Provide students with about 5 minutes and you will see the collection to start exponentially having content and ideas related to that topic.
- Digital Portfolios/Resumes
Another fun way to use Wakelet with students is to have them create their own digital portfolio using Wakelet as the template to do so. Show your students the Wakelet Templates for digital portfolios. Students can create their own collection on Wakelet using a digital portfolio template to house their work and content for your class as well as others.
- Other Strategies Using Wakelet
Besides the collaborative brainstorm strategy, there are “getting to know” each other activities. Also, students can work collaboratively on a project together in the same Wakelet collection by sharing the link to each other.
Conclusion – Many Opportunities with Wakelet!
Overall, there are many opportunities to utilize Wakelet for yourself and your students! There are endless opportunities. Take a look at more resources below to help you learn more about this free and easy to use tool!
Essential Resources
Navigating the Present and Future of Education 