Vipula Sharma provides an introduction to Wakelet and how you can easily start using in your classroom to transform teaching and learning.  

Have you heard of Wakelet? Are you looking for a free, flexible, easy to use and highly versatile platform that will allow you to do the following things:

– Flip learning resources
– Curate tweets from an account or a particular hashtag
– Create visually appealing bookmarks
– Create and share a collection of curated resources
– Add text, images, video (from YouTube and Flipgrid), upload pdfs and documents directly from your Google Drive or OneDrive (Wakelet is a Microsoft partner, with humble beginnings in Manchester; it is also integrated with Immersive Reader)
– Collaborate on a newsletter and great embed feature
– Creative digital storytelling that allows for some serious app smashing
– A presentation tool
– A professional portfolio
– Create a learning space for a class, a project, a club, your faculty, your team
– Share your collections and invite others to collaborate easily via a link or a QR code

During lockdown Wakelet hosted a week long webinar aimed at educators; the diverse and global nature of the community was quite inspiring as were the range of speakers and themes being discussed. The focus was not on the tech but on all the powerful learning opportunities that it made possible.

Wakelet’s tagline is “humans are at the heart of everything” and this is very transparent, not just from the design of the platform itself but also from the sharing and collaborating #WakeletWave community.

Wakelet really listens to educators, tries to understand their needs and acts on feedback – they recently launched an exciting collaborative feature called ‘Spaces’; this allows you to create visual, engaging, comprehensive spaces of collections where you can invite others to collaborate and share. I plan on using this with my colleagues where we can share ideas for hybrid teaching as we move forwards in this challenging time and I am looking forward to trying ‘Spaces’ out with my Yr10 class as they embark on their IGCSE English Language course. ‘Spaces’ can be private or public and new features such as commenting, moderating, reactions and notifications will be added soon.

Wakelet really is an easy to use collaborative tool that enhances organisation, curation and collaboration within learning communities.

You can easily access webinars here: https://www.youtube.com/user/wakelet/videos

An educator’s guide is available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15MPavRhnwSWyHbNucLPadzOXCl_YiIUY/view

You can also follow Wakelet updates here: https://www.facebook.com/watch/Wakelet/

The video below provides an introduction to creating collections in Wakelet.