Wakelet: Way to do a conference! (and a heck of a lot more)

Like many of my educator colleagues, I’ll confess to having been a webinar junkie under quarantine. Like many of my edtech colleagues across the world, a couple of weeks back I attended Wakelet Community Week.

I was already sold on the free, flexible collaborative platform. As an early adopter, I’ve used Wakelet to curate conferences and events, as a strategy for sharing current events/awareness and readings for my LIS classes, as a presentation tool, as a mood board for creative instructional strategies, as a strategy for creating a social media portfolio for my promotion package, as a personal knowledge management tool, and so much more.

Wakelet is an app smashing superstar. I am especially fond of its integration with Immersive Reader, Flipgrid, and Google Drive and Classroom, and recently Microsoft’s Sway. It plays nice with all my favorite platforms. It embeds in nearly everything. I can embed nearly anything in it. Depending upon the curation need, sometimes I use Wakelet as the final curated product. Sometimes I embed a Wakelet into another platform.

Over the course of Wakelet Community Week, an impressive company of Wakelet ambassadors, educators, students, and experts from around the world not only shared ideas for addressing critical issues and how they used the platform, they also demonstrated how the collaborative platform can be used present sessions. Over the course of the week, these members of the Community illustrated an effective strategy for interacting during and sharing and archiving during an online conference.

After each of the Zoom sessions rendered, they were (it seemed) instantly included as the first resource on the session’s Wakelet. Session Wakelets also included lists and contacts for the presenters (including their other curated Wakelets), tweets about the sessions, and all the resources described.

It was kind of like wishing for more wishes when you find a magic lamp because, of course, those shared resources included many, many other Wakelets packed with additional resources, and leading me to build a powerful network of inspirational follows. I can easily imagine teacher-librarians sharing similar fabulous follows for their grade level and subject area classroom teacher partners.

In at least one case, a resource was created during the session. Check out School Librarians to Follow on Wakelet, led by Sherri Gick and curated during Wakelet in the Library! session.

Here’s the list of Wakelet Community Week sessions:

• Wakelet Live
• How Students Use Wakelet
• The Art of App Smashing
• Collaborate with Wakelet
• How School Leaders Use Wakelet
• How to Use Wakelet in the Classroom
• Connecting the Community: Race & Culture – Where we are, and where we should be going
• Wake Up! Top 10 Ways to Boost Productivity and Creativity With Wakelet
• Wakelet in the Library!
• Using Wakelet as a Tech Coach
• Tech Like a Pirate
• Microsoft & Wakelet–Better Together
• Working as a Team to Win the Game!
• The Power of an Infused Classroom
• Happy Hour! Fun ways to Use Wakelet Outside the Classroom!

New to the platform? You may want to get started with the clearly illustrated Educator’s Guide, complete with inspiring examples.

In their reflective tweets, Wakelet friends, James, Mishbah and Teijas shared their personal takeways from Community Week.

Filed under: technology