In the summer of 2020 I think I managed to clog up my whole email inbox with mails to myself saying “must watch”, or “must read” or “do this course” as I clambered to get to grips with the new reality of remote teaching and learning…….. Did I ever go back in and even look at them? Never. Well, maybe one or two, but they were so disorganised and by the time I got back to them, I hadn’t even labelled them well enough to know what they were about. If you are this person, read on!
I am a professional learning and development coordinator for the City of Dublin Education and Training Board and one of my preferred ways to learn and to develop myself is using Twitter. Twitter is a site that houses online news and social networking. It is a form of microblogging. People communicate in short messages called tweets. You follow people, they follow you, and you post these short messages, the tweets, and anyone who follows you can see them and interact with them by liking them, retweeting them so all their followers can read them, and/or by commenting on them. You hope that what you post, or retweet will be of value or interest to your followers. If they like it, they like it with the click of a little heart button. You only have an allowance of 280 characters or less, so it is a great way of being clear in the message you want to convey. Then you can also add 4 photos (please remember to add alt text to images so screen readers can interpret them).
I use Twitter a lot for keeping up to date on pedagogy, inclusivity, accessibility and the most recent research in social justice and equity. I carefully select the accounts I choose to follow so that my timeline is peppered with little nuggets of information all day long…. A drip-feed of learning and development. However, it can very often become overwhelming. I’ll stumble across something that I just don’t have the time to read there and then (usually this is between meetings when I don’t have enough time to get started on a new task so I reach for Twitter on my phone instead!), or it’s too important for me to just brush past, or I read it and have an AHA! moment of how I would like to incorporate this new idea or thought or research or tool into the work I am engaging with. Enter Wakelet. It has become my Saviour for curating all the things that fall into all those categories.
So, what is Wakelet, I hear you ask. Well, Wakelet is a free platform that allows you to organise content form across the web. It has many different uses, but they mainly fall into four categories. It can be used to bookmark, organise, collaborate, and share. I mainly use my Wakelet to curate and organise all my little nuggets of information gathered online, and especially on Twitter. You can find out more about Wakelet on Aedamar’s Blog by going to this link. If you want to see how I curate my resources from Twitter to Wakelet, watch the video below.
I’ve also added it to the Twitter app on my phone so I can save directly while on-the-go.
It is so simple to get the information or the resources that I want from Twitter up and loaded into my Wakelet collections. Watch the recording below to see what the end product looks like.
Have a think about using both Twitter and Wakelet to support your own professional learning and Development and to curate all your own little nuggets! You can follow me on Twitter with my Twitter handle @Carcher_PD and on Wakelet as @carriearcher_PD